**  If  vou  know  your  toad,  it  is  all  right.''''  —  Page  39. 


MY   SUMMER   IN   A 
GARDEN 

BY 
CHARLES   DUDLEY  WARNER 

WITH  ILLUSTRATIONS   BY 
F.  O.  C.  DARLEY 


BOSTON    AND    NEW   YORK 
HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,    1870,   BY   FIELDS,   OSGOOD   &   CO. 

COPYRIGHT,    1898,    BY   CHARLES  DUDLEY  WARNER 

COPYRIGHT,    1912,   BY   SUSAN  LEE   WARNER 

ALL   RIGHTS  RESERVED 


LIST  OF   ILLUSTRATIONS. 

[THE  DRAWINGS  BY  F.  O.  C.  DARLEY.] 

PAGB 

IF  YOU  KNOW  YOUR  TOAD,  IT  is  ALL  RIGHT.    Frontispiece 
THE  POLES  HAD  COME  UP  BEAUTIFULLY         ...     24 

LET  US  RESPECT  THE  CAT 60 

HE  BURST  INTO  TEARS 74 

I  TRIED  THE  SCARE-CROW  PLAN 89 

THE  TOADS  CAME  OUT  OF  THEIR  HOLES    .       .       .         115 
I  TOLD  THE  MAN  THAT  I  COULD  NOT  HAVE  THE  COW 

IN  THE  GROUNDS 119 

LOOKING  FOR  A  LOST  HEN 123 

POLLY  UNFOLDS  A  SMALL  SCHEME  OF  BENEVOLENCE    .    130 

WHAT  NICE  ONES  ! 154 

HE  SAID  HE  WAS  ONLY  EATING  SOME      .       .       .       .159 
POLLY  SAYS  IT  is  A  PERFECT  MATCH  .       .       .       .        175 


INTRODUCTORY   LETTER. 

Y   DEAR   MR.  FIELDS,  — I   did 

promise  to  write  an  Introduction 
to  these  charming  papers  ;  but  an 
Introduction,  —  what  is  it  ?  —  a  sort  of  pilaster, 
put  upon  the  face  of  a  building  for  looks'  sake, 
and  usually  flat,  —  very  flat.  Sometimes  it  may 
be  called  a  caryatid,  which  is,  as  I  understand 
it,  a  cruel  device  of  architecture,  representing  a 
man  or  a  woman,  obliged  to  hold  up  upon  his 
or  her  head  or  shoulders  a  structure  which 
they  did  not  build,  and  which  could  stand  just 
as  well  without  as  with  them.  But  an  Intro 
duction  is  more  apt  to  be  a  pillar,  such  as  one 


2  INTRODUCTORY   LETTER. 

may  see  in  Baalbec,  standing  up  in  the  air  all 
alone,  with  nothing  on  it,  and  with  nothing  for 
it  to  do. 

But  an  Introductory  Letter  is  different.  There 
is  in  that  no  formality,  no  assumption  of  func 
tion,  no  awkward  propriety  or  dignity  to  be 
sustained.  A  letter  at  the  opening  of  a  book 
may  be  only  a  footpath,  leading  the  curious  to  a 
favorable  point  of  observation,  and  then  leaving 
them  to  wander  as  they  will. 

Sluggards  have  been  sent  to  the  ant  for  wis 
dom  ;  but  writers  might  better  be  sent  to  the 
spider,  —  not  because  he  works  all  night,  and 
watches  all  day,  but  because  he  works  uncon 
sciously.  He  dare  not  even  bring  his  work 
before  his  own  eyes,  but  keeps  it  behind  him, 
as  if  too  much  knowledge  of  what  one  is  doing 
would  spoil  the  delicacy  and  modesty  of  one's 
work. 

Almost  all  graceful  and  fanciful  work  is  born 


INTRODUCTORY   LETTER.  3 

like  a  dream,  that  comes  noiselessly,  and  tarries 
silently,  and  goes  as  a  bubble  bursts.  And  yet 
somewhere  work  must  come  in,  —  real,  well- 
considered  work. 

Inness  (the  best  American  painter  of  Nature 
in  her  moods  of  real  human  feeling)  once  said, 
"No  man  can  do  anything  in  art,  unless  he  has 
intuitions ;  but,  between  whiles,  one  must  work 
hard  in  collecting  the  materials  out  of  which 
intuitions  are  made."  The  truth  could  not  be 
hit  off  better.  Knowledge  is  the  soil,  and  intui 
tions  are  the  flowers  which  grow  up  out  of  it. 
The  soil  must  be  well  enriched  and  worked. 

It  is  very  plain,  or  will  be  to  those  who  read 
these  papers,  now  gathered  up  into  this  book,  as 
into  a  chariot  for  a  race,  that  the  author  has 
long  employed  his  eyes,  his  ears,  and  his  under 
standing,  in  observing  and  considering  the  facts 
of  Nature,  and  in  weaving  curious  analogies. 
Being  an  editor  of  one  of  the  oldest  daily  news- 


4  INTRODUCTORY    LETTER. 

papers  in  New  England,  and  obliged  to  fill  its 
columns  day  after  day  (as  the  village  mill  is 
obliged  to  render  every  day  so  many  sacks  of  flour 
or  of  meal  to  its  hungry  customers),  it  naturally 
occurred  to  him,  "  Why  not  write  something 
which  I  myself,  as  well  as  my  readers,  shall 
enjoy  ?  The  market  gives  them  facts  enough  ; 
politics,  lies  enough  ;  art,  affectations  enough  ; 
criminal  news,  horrors  enough  ;  fashion,  more 
than  enough  of  vanity  upon  vanity,  and  vexation 
of  purse.  Why  should  they  not  have  some  of 
those  wandering  and  joyous  fancies  which  solace 
my  hours  ? " 

The  suggestion  ripened  into  execution.  Men 
and  women  read,  and  wanted  more.  These  gar 
den  letters  began  to  blossom  every  week  ;  and 
many  hands  were  glad  to  gather  pleasure  from 
them.  A  sign  it  was  of  wisdom.  In  our  feverish 
days  it  is  a  sign  of  health  or  of  convalescence 
that  men  love  gentle  pleasure,  and  enjoyments 


INTRODUCTORY    LETTER.  5 

that  do  not  rush  or  roar,  but  distil  as  the 
dew. 

The  love  of  rural  life,  the  habit  of  finding 
joyment  in  familiar  things,  that  susceptibility 
to  Nature  which  keeps  the  nerve  gently  thrilled 
in  her  homeliest  nooks  and  by  her  commonest 
sounds,  is  worth  a  thousand  fortunes  of  money, 
or  its  equivalents. 

Every  book  which  interprets  the  secret  lore  of 
fields  and  gardens,  every  essay  that  brings  men 
nearer  to  the  understanding  of  the  mysteries 
which  every  tree  whispers,  every  brook  murmurs, 
every  weed,  even,  hints,  is  a  contribution  to  the 
wealth  and  the  happiness  of  our  kind.  And  if 
the  lines  of  the  writer  shall  be  traced  in  quaint 
characters,  and  be  filled  with  a  grave  humor,  or 
break  out  at  times  into  merriment,  all  this  will 
be  no  presumption  against  their  wisdom  or  his 
goodness.  Is  the  oak  less  strong  and  tough  be 
cause  the  mosses  and  weather-stains  stick  in  al] 


0  INTRODUCTORY   LETTER. 

manner  of  grotesque  sketches  along  its  bark? 
Now,  truly,  one  may  not  learn  from  this  little 
book  either  divinity  or  horticulture  ;  but  if  he 
gets  a  pure  happiness,  and  a  tendency  to  repeat 
the  happiness  from  the  simple  stores  of  Nature, 
he  will  gain  from  our  friend's  garden  what  Adam 
lost  in  his,  and  what  neither  philosophy  nor 
divinity  has  always  been  able  to  restore. 

Wherefore,  thanking  you  for  listening  to  a 
former  letter,  which  begged  you  to  consider 
whether  these  curious  and  ingenious  papers, 
that  go  winding  about  like  a  half-trodden  path 
between  the  garden  and  the  field,  might  not  be 
given  in  book-form  to  your  million  readers,  I 
remain,  yours  to  command  in  everything  but 
the  writing  of  an  Introduction, 

HENRY  WARD  BEECHER. 


BY   WAY   OF    DEDICATION. 


Y  DEAR  POLLY,— When  a  few 
of  these  papers  had  appeared  in 
"  The  Courant,"  I  was  encouraged 
to  continue  them  by  hearing  that  they  had 
at  least  one  reader  who  read  them  with  the 
serious  mind  from  which  alone  profit  is  to  be 
expected.  It  was  a  maiden  lady,  who,  I  am 
sure,  was  no  more  to  blame  for  her  singleness 
than  for  her  age  ;  and  she  looked  to  these  hon 
est  sketches  of  experience  for  that  aid  which 
the  professional  agricultural  papers  could  not 
give  in  the  management  of  the  little  bit  of  gar 
den  which  she  called  her  own.  She  may  have 
been  my  only  disciple  ;  and  I  confess  that  the 


8  BY   WAY    OF    DEDICATION. 

thought  of  her  yielding  a  simple  faith  to  what  a 
gainsaying  world  may  have  regarded  with  levity 
has  contributed  much  to  give  an  increased  prac 
tical  turn  to  my  reports  of  what  I  know  about 
gardening.  The  thought  that  I  had  misled  a 
lady,  whose  age  is  not  her  only  singularity,  who 
looked  to  me  for  advice  which  should  be  not  at 
all  the  fanciful  product  of  the  Garden  of  Gull, 
would  give  me  great  pain.  I  trust  that  her 
autumn  is  a  peaceful  one,  and  undisturbed  by 
either  the  humorous  or  the  satirical  side  of 
Nature. 

You  know  that  this  attempt  to  tell  the  truth 
about  one  of  the  most  fascinating  occupations  in 
the  world  has  not  been  without  its  dangers.  I 
have  received  anonymous  letters.  Some  of  them 
were  murderously  spelled  ;  others  were  missives 
in  such  elegant  phrase  and  dress,  that  danger 
was  only  to  be  apprehended  in  them  by  one 
skilled  in  the  mysteries  of  mediaeval  poisoning, 


BY    WAY    OF    DEDICATION.  9 

when  death  flew  on  the  wings  of  a  perfume. 
One  lady,  whose  entreaty  that  I  should  pause 
had  something  of  command  in  it,  wrote  that  my 
strictures  on  "  pusley  "  had  so  inflamed  her  hus 
band's  zeal,  that,  in  her  absence  in  the  country, 
he  had  rooted  up  all  her  beds  of  portulaca  (a  sort 
of  cousin  of  the  fat  weed),  and  utterly  cast  it  out. 
It  is,  however,  to  be  expected,  that  retributive 
justice  would  visit  the  innocent  as  well  as  the 
guilty  of  an  offending  family.  This  is  only  an 
other  proof  of  the  wide  sweep  of  moral  forces. 
I  suppose  that  it  is  as  necessary  in  the  vegetable 
world  as  it  is  elsewhere  to  avoid  the  appearance 
of  evil. 

In  offering  you  the  fruit  of  my  garden,  which 
has  been  gathered  from  week  to  week,  without 
much  reference  to  the  progress  of  the  crops  or 
the  drought,  I  desire  to  acknowledge  an  influence 
which  has  lent  half  the  charm  to  my  labor.  If 
I  were  in  a  court  of  justice,  or  injustice,  under 
i* 


IO  BY    WAY   OF   DEDICATION. 

oath,  I  should  not  like  to  say,  that,  either  in  the 
wooing  days  of  spring,  or  under  the  suns  of  the 
summer  solstice,  you  had  been,  either  with  hoe, 
rake,  or  miniature  spade,  of  the  least  use  in  the 
garden  ;  but  your  suggestions  have  been  invalu 
able,  and,  whenever  used,  have  been  paid  for. 
Your  horticultural  inquiries  have  been  of  a 
nature  to  astonish  the  vegetable  world,  if  it 
listened,  and  were  a  constant  inspiration  to  re 
search.  There  was  almost  nothing  that  you  did 
not  wish  to  know  ;  and  this,  added  to  what  I 
wished  to  know,  made  a  boundless  field  for  dis 
covery.  What  might  have  become  of  the  gar 
den,  if  your  advice  had  been  followed,  a  good 
Providence  only  knows ;  but  I  never  worked 
there  without  a  consciousness  that  you  might  at 
any  moment  come  down  the  walk,  under  the 
grape-arbor,  bestowing  glances  of  approval,  that 
were  none  the  worse  for  not  being  critical ;  exer 
cising  a  sort  of  superintendence  that  elevated 


BY   WAY   OF   DEDICATION.  II 

gardening  into  a  fine  art ;  expressing  a  wondei 
that  was  as  complimentary  to  me  as  it  was  to 
Nature  ;  bringing  an  atmosphere  which  made 
the  garden  a  region  of  romance,  the  soil  of 
which  was  set  apart  for  fruits  native  to  climes 
unseen.  It  was  this  bright  presence  that  filled 
the  garden,  as  it  did  the  summer,  with  light, 
and  now  leaves  upon  it  that  tender  play  of 
color  and  bloom  which  is  called  among  the  Alps 

the  after-glow. 

C.  D.  W. 

NOOK  FARM,  HARTFORD,  October,  1870. 


MY  SUMMER  IN  A  GARDEN. 


PRELIMINARY. 

,HE  love  of  dirt  is  among  the  earliest 
of  passions,  as  it  is  the  latest.  Mud- 
pies  gratify  one  of  our  first  and  best 
instincts.  So  long  as  we  are  dirty,  we  are  pure. 
Fondness  for  the  ground  comes  back  to  a  man 
after  he  has  run  the  round  of  pleasure  and  busi 
ness,  eaten  dirt,  and  sown  wild-oats,  drifted  about 
the  world,  and  taken  the  wind  of  all  its  moods. 
The  love  of  digging  in  the  ground  (or  of  looking 
on  while  he  pays  another  to  dig)  is  as  sure  to 
come  back  to  him  as  he  is  sure,  at  last,  to  go 
under  the  ground,  and  stay  there.  To  own  a  bit 
of  ground,  to  scratch  it  with  a  hoe,  to  plant 


1 6  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

seeds,  and  watch  their  renewal  of  life,  —  this  is 
the  commonest  delight  of  the  race,  the  most  sat 
isfactory  thing  a  man  can  do.  When  Cicero 
writes  of  the  pleasures  of  old  age,  that  of  agri 
culture  is  chief  among  them :  "  Venio  nunc  act 
voluptates  agricolarum,  quibus  ego  incredibiliter 
delector:  qti<z  nee  ulla  impediuntur  senectute,  et 
mihi  ad  sapientis  vitam  proxime  videntur  acce- 
dere"  (I  am  driven  to  Latin  because  New  York 
editors  have  exhausted  the  English  language  in 
the  praising  of  spring,  and  especially  of  the 
month  of  May.) 

Let  us  celebrate  the  soil.  Most  men  toil  that 
they  may  own  a  piece  of  it  ;  they  measure  their 
success  in  life  by  their  ability  to  buy  it.  It  is 
alike  the  passion  of  the  parvenu  and  the  pride  of 
the  aristocrat.  Broad  acres  are  a  patent  of  no 
bility  ;  and  no  man  but  feels  more  of  a  man  in 
the  world  if  he  have  a  bit  of  ground  that  he  can 
call  his  own.  However  small  it  is  on  the  sur- 


PRELIMINARY.  I/ 

face,  it  is  four  thousand  miles  deep  ;  and  that  is  a 
very  handsome  property.  And  there  is  a  great 
pleasure  in  working  in  the  soil,  apart  from  the 
ownership  of  it.  The  man  who  has  planted  a 
garden  feels  that  he  has  done  something  for  the 
good  of  the  world.  He  belongs  to  the  produ 
cers.  It  is  a  pleasure  to  eat  of  the  fruit  of  one's 
toil,  if  it  be  nothing  more  than  a  head  of  let 
tuce  or  an  ear  of  corn.  One  cultivates  a  lawn 
even  with  great  satisfaction  ;  for  there  is  noth 
ing  more  beautiful  than  grass  and  turf  in  our 
latitude.  The  tropics  may  have  their  delights ; 
but  they  have  not  turf:  and  the  world  with 
out  turf  is  a  dreary  desert.  The  original  Gar 
den  of  Eden  could  not  have  had  such  turf  as 
one  sees  in  England.  The  Teutonic  races 
all  love  turf:  they  emigrate  in  the  line  of  its 
growth. 

To  dig  in  the  mellow  soil  —  to  dig  moderately, 
for  all  pleasure  should  be  taken  sparingly  —  is 


i8  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

a  great  thing.  One  gets  strength  out  of  the 
ground  as  often  as  one  really  touches  it  with  a 
hoe.  Antaeus  (this  is  a  classical  article)  was  no 
doubt  an  agriculturist  ;  and  such  a  prize-fighter 
as  Hercules  could  n't  do  anything  with  him  till 
he  got  him  to  lay  down  his  spade,  and  quit  the 
soil.  It  is  not  simply  beets  and  potatoes  and 
corn  and  string-beans  that  one  raises  in  his  well- 
hoed  garden  :  it  is  the  average  of  human  life. 
There  is  life  in  the  ground  ;  it  goes  into  the 
seeds  ;  and  it  also,  when  it  is  stirred  up,  goes 
into  the  man  who  stirs  it.  The  hot  sun  on  his 
back  as  he  bends  to  his  shovel  and  hoe,  or  con 
templatively  rakes  the  warm  and  fragrant  loam, 
is  better  than  much  medicine.  The  buds  are 
coming  out  on  the  bushes  round  about ;  the 
blossoms  of  the  fruit-trees  begin  to  show  ;  the 
blood  is  running  up  the  grape-vines  in  streams  ; 
you  can  smell  the  wild-flowers  on  the  near  bank  •, 
and  the  birds  are  flying  and  glancing  and  singing 


PRELIMINARY.  IQ 

everywhere.  To  the  open  kitchen-door  comes 
the  busy  housewife  to  shake  a  white  something, 
and  stands  a  moment  to  look,  quite  transfixed  by 
the  delightful  sights  and  sounds.  Hoeing  in  the 
garden  on  a  bright,  soft  May  day,  when  you  are 
not  obliged  to,  is  nearly  equal  to  the  delight  of 
going  trouting. 

Blessed  be  agriculture  !  if  one  does  not  have 
too  much  of  it.  All  literature  is  fragrant  with  it, 
in  a  gentlemanly  way.  At  the  foot  of  the  charm 
ing  olive-covered  hills  of  Tivoli,  Horace  (not  he 
of  Chappaqua)  had  a  sunny  farm  :  it  was  in  sight 
of  Hadrian's  villa,  who  did  landscape-gardening 
on  an  extensive  scale,  and  probably  did  not  get 
half  as  much  comfort  out  of  it  as  Horace  did 
from  his  more  simply -tilled  acres.  We  trust  that 
Horace  did  a  little  hoeing  and  farming  himself, 
and  that  his  verse  is  not  all  fraudulent  sentiment. 
In  order  to  enjoy  agriculture,  you  do  not  want 
too  much  of  it,  and  you  want  to  be  poor  enough 


20 


MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 


to  have  a  little  inducement  to  work  moderately 
yourself.  Hoe  while  it  is  spring,  and  enjoy  the 
best  anticipations.  It  is  not  much  matter  if 
things  do  not  turn  out  well. 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT  GAR- 
DENING. 

FIRST  WEEK. 
NDER  this  modest  title,  I  purpose  to 
write  a  series  of  papers,  some  of  which 
will  be  like  many  papers  of  garden- 
seeds,  with  nothing  vital  in  them,  on  the  subject 
of  gardening  ;  holding  that  no  man  has  any  right 
to  keep  valuable  knowledge  to  himself,  and  hop 
ing  that  those  who  come  after  me,  except  tax- 
gatherers  and  that  sort  of  person,  will  find  profit 
in  the  perusal  of  my  experience.  As  my  knowl 
edge  is  constantly  increasing,  there  is  likely  to 
be  no  end  to  these  papers.  They  will  pursue 
no  orderly  system  of  agriculture  or  horticul- 


22  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

ture,  but  range  from  topic  to  topic,  according 
to  the  weather  and  the  progress  of  the  weeds, 
which  may  drive  me  from  one  corner  of  the 
garden  to  the  other. 

The  principal  value  of  a  private  garden  is  not 
understood.  It  is  not  to  give  the  possessor  vege 
tables  and  fruit  (that  can  be  better  and  cheaper 
done  by  the  market-gardeners),  but  to  teach  him 
patience  and  philosophy,  and  the  higher  virtues, 
—  hope  deferred,  and  expectations  blighted,  lead 
ing  directly  to  resignation,  and  sometimes  to 
alienation.  The  garden  thus  becomes  a  moral 
agent,  a  test  of  character,  as  it  was  in  the  begin 
ning.  I  shall  keep  this  central  truth  in  mind  in 
these  articles.  I  mean  to  have  a  moral  garden, 
if  it  is  not  a  productive  one,  —  one  that  shall 
teach,  O  my  brothers  !  O  my  sisters !  the  great 
lessons  of  life. 

The  first  pleasant  thing  about  a  garden  in  this 
latitude  is,  that  you  never  know  when  to  set  it 


WHAT   I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  23 

going.  If  you  want  anything  to  come  to  matu 
rity  early,  you  must  start  it  in  a  hot-house.  If 
you  put  it  out  early,  the  chances  are  all  in  favor 
of  getting  it  nipped  with  frost ;  for  the  thermom 
eter  will  be  90°  one  day,  and  go  below  32°  the 
night  of  the  day  following.  And,  if  you  do  not 
set  out  plants  or  sow  seeds  early,  you  fret  con 
tinually  ;  knowing  that  your  vegetables  will  be 
late,  and  that,  while  Jones  has  early  peas,  you 
will  be  watching  your  slow-forming  pods.  This 
keeps  you  in  a  state  of  mind.  When  you  have 
planted  anything  early,  you  are  doubtful  whether 
to  desire  to  see  it  above  ground,  or  not.  If 
a  hot  day  comes,  you  long  to  see  the  young 
plants  ;  but,  when  a  cold  north-wind  brings  frost, 
you  tremble  lest  the  seeds  have  burst  their  bands. 
Your  spring  is  passed  in  anxious  doubts  and 
fears,  which  are  usually  realized ;  and  so  a  great 
moral  discipline  is  worked  out  for  you. 

Now,  there  is  my  corn,  two  or  three  inches 


24  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

high  this  1 8th  of  May,  and  apparently  having  no 
fear  of  a  frost.  I  was  hoeing  it  this  morning  for 
the  first  time,  —  it  is  not  well  usually  to  hoe  corn 
until  about  the  i8th  of  May,  —  when  Polly  came 
out  to  look  at  the  Lima  beans.  She  seemed  to 
think  the  poles  had  come  up  beautifully.  I 
thought  they  did  look  well :  they  are  a  fine 
set  of  poles,  large  and  well  grown,  and  stand 
straight.  They  were  inexpensive  too.  The 
cheapness  came  about  from  my  cutting  them  on 
another  man's  land,  and  he  did  not  know  it.  I 
have  not  examined  this  transaction  in  the  moral 
light  of  gardening  ;  but  I  know  people  in  this 
country  take  great  liberties  at  the  polls.  Polly 
noticed  that  the  beans  had  not  themselves  come 
up  in  any  proper  sense,  but  that  the  dirt  had  got 
off  from  them,  leaving  them  uncovered.  She 
thought  it  would  be  well  to  sprinkle  a  slight 
layer  of  dirt  over  them  ;  and  I,  indulgently,  con 
sented.  It  occurred  to  me,  when  she  had  gone, 


"  The  foles  had  come  tip  beaittifi'.llv"  —  Page  24. 


WHAT   I    KNOW  ABOUT   GARDENING.  25 

that  beans  always  come  up  that  way,  —  wrong 
end  first ;  and  that  what  they  wanted  was  light, 
and  not  dirt. 

Observation.  —  Woman  always  did,  from  the 
first,  make  a  muss  in  a  garden. 

I  inherited  with  my  garden  a  large  patch  of 
raspberries.  Splendid  berry  the  raspberry,  when 
the  strawberry  has  gone.  This  patch  has  grown 
into  such  a  defiant  attitude,  that  you  could  not 
get  within  several  feet  of  it.  Its  stalks  were 
enormous  in  size,  and  cast  out  long,  prickly  arms 
in  all  directions  ;  but  the  bushes  were  pretty 
much  all  dead.  I  have  walked  into  them  a  good 
deal  with  a  pruning-knife  ;  but  it  is  very  much 
like  fighting  original  sin.  The  variety  is  one 
that  I  can  recommend.  I  think  it  is  called 
Brinckley's  Orange.  It  is  exceedingly  prolific, 
and  has  enormous  stalks.  The  fruit  is  also  said 
to  be  good  ;  but  that  does  not  matter  so  much, 
as  the  plant  does  not  often  bear  in  this  region. 


26  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

The  stalks  seem  to  be  biennial  institutions  ;  and 
as  they  get  about  their  growth  one  year,  ana 
bear  the  next  year,  and  then  die,  and  the  winters 
here  nearly  always  kill  them,  unless  you  take 
them  into  the  house  (which  is  inconvenient  if 
you  have  a  family  of  small  children),  it  is  very 
difficult  to  induce  the  plant  to  flower  and  fruit. 
This  is  the  greatest  objection  there  is  to  this 
sort  of  raspberry.  I  think  of  keeping  these  for 
discipline,  and  setting  out  some  others,  more 
hardy  sorts,  for  fruit. 


SECOND    WEEK. 

'EXT  to  deciding  when  to  start  your 
garden,  the  most  important  matter  is, 
what  to  put  in  it.  It  is  difficult  to 
decide  what  to  order  for  dinner  on  a  given  day  : 
how  much  more  oppressive  is  it  to  order  in  a 
lump  an  endless  vista  of  dinners,  so  to  speak  ! 
For,  unless  your  garden  is  a  boundless  prairie 
(and  mine  seems  to  me  to  be  that  when  I  hoe  it 
on  hot  days),  you  must  make  a  selection,  from 
the  great  variety  of  vegetables,  of  those  you  will 
raise  in  it ;  and  you  feel  rather  bound  to  supply 
your  own  table  from  your  own  garden,  and  to  eat 
only  as  you  have  sown. 

I  hold  that  no  man  has  a  right  (whatever  his 


28  MY   SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

sex,  of  course)  to  have  a  garden  to  his  own  self* 
ish  uses.  He  ought  not  to  please  himself,  but 
every  man  to  please  his  neighbor.  I  tried  to 
have  a  garden  that  would  give  general  moral 
satisfaction.  It  seemed  to  me  that  nobody  could 
object  to  potatoes  (a  most  useful  vegetable)  ;  and 
I  began  to  plant  them  freely.  But  there  was 
a  chorus  of  protest  against  them.  "  You  don't 
want  to  take  up  your  ground  with  potatoes,"  the 
neighbors  said  :  "  you  can  buy  potatoes  "  (the 
very  thing  I  wanted  to  avoid  doing  is  buying 
things).  "  What  you  want  is  the  perishable 
things  that  you  cannot  get  fresh  in  the  market." 
—  "  But  what  kind  of  perishable  things  ?  "  A 
horticulturist  of  eminence  wanted  me  to  sow 
lines  of  strawberries  and  raspberries  right  over 
where  I  had  put  my  potatoes  in  drills.  I  had 
about  five  hundred  strawberry-plants  in  another 
part  of  my  garden  ;  but  this  fruit-fanatic  wanted 
me  to  turn  my  whob  patch  inco  vines  and  run- 


WHAT   1   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  29 

ners.  I  suppose  I  could  raise  strawberries 
enougn  for  all  my  neighbors ;  and  perhaps  I 
ought  to  do  it.  I  had  a  little  space  prepared 
for  melons,  —  musk-melons,  —  which  I  showed 
to  an  experienced  friend.  "You  are  not  {^oing 
to  waste  your  ground  on  musk-melons  ? "  he 
asked.  "  They  rarely  ripen  in  this  climate  thor 
oughly,  before  frost."  He  had  tried  for  years 
without  luck.  I  resolved  to  not  go  into  such  a 
foolish  experiment.  But,  the  next  day,  another 
neighbor  happened  in.  "  Ah !  I  see  you  are 
going  to  have  melons.  My  family  would  rather 
give  up  anything  else  in  the  garden  than  musk- 
melons,  —  of  the  nutmeg  variety.  They  are  the 
most  grateful  things  we  have  on  the  table."  So 
there  it  was.  There  was  no  compromise  :  it  was 
melons,  or  no  melons,  and  somebody  offended  in 
any  case.  I  half  resolved  to  plant  them  a  little 
late,  so  that  they  would,  and  they  would  n't.  But 
I  had  the  same  difficulty  about  string-beans 


3O  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

which  I  detest),  and  squash  (which  I  tolerate), 
and  parsnips,  and  the  whole  round  of  green 
things. 

I  have  pretty  much  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  you  have  got  to  put  your  foot  down  in  gar 
dening.  If  I  had  actually  taken  counsel  of  my 
friends,  I  should  not  have  had  a  thing  growing 
in  the  garden  to-day  but  weeds.  And  besides, 
while  you  are  waiting,  Nature  does  not  wait. 
Her  mind  is  made  up.  She  knows  just  what 
she  will  raise  ;  and  she  has  an  infinite  variety  of 
early  and  late.  The  most  humiliating  thing  to 
me  about  a  garden  is  the  lesson  it  teaches  of  the 
inferiority  of  man.  Nature  is  prompt,  decided, 
inexhaustible.  She  thrusts  up  Ler  plants  with  a 
vigor  and  freedom  that  I  admire  ;  and  the  more 
worthless  the  plant,  the  more  rapid  and  splendid 
its  growth.  She  is  at  it  early  and  late,  and  all 
night ;  never  tiring,  nor  showing  the  least  sign 
of  exhaustion. 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  3! 

"  Eternal  gardening  is  the  price  of  liberty,"  is 
a  motto  that  I  should  put  over  the  gateway  of 
my  garden,  if  I  had  a  gate.  And  yet  it  is  not 
wholly  true  ;  for  there  is  no  liberty  in  gardening. 
The  man  who  undertakes  a  garden  is  relentlessly 
pursued.  He  felicitates  himself  that,  when  he 
gets  it  once  planted,  he  will  have  a  season  of  rest 
and  of  enjoyment  in  the  sprouting  and  growing 
of  his  seeds.  It  is  a  green  anticipation.  He 
has  planted  a  seed  that  will  keep  him  awake 
nights ;  drive  rest  from  his  bones,  and  sleep 
from  his  pillow.  Hardly  is  the  garden  planted, 
when  he  must  begin  to  hoe  it.  The  weeds 
have  sprung  up  all  over  it  in  a  night.  They 
shine  and  wave  in  redundant  life.  The  docks 
have  almost  gone  to  seed  ;  and  their  roots  go 
deeper  than  conscience.  Talk  about  the  Lon 
don  Docks  !  —  the  roots  of  these  are  like  the 
sources  of  the  Aryan  race.  And  the  weeds  are 
not  all.  I  awake  in  the  morning  (and  a  thriving 


32  MY    SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

garden  will  wake  a  person  up  two  hours  before 
he  ought  to  be  out  of  bed)  and  think  of  the 
tomato-plants,  —  the  leaves  like  fine  lace-work, 
owing  to  black  bugs  that  skip  around,  and  can't 
be  caught.  Somebody  ought  to  get  up  before 
the  dew  is  off,  (why  don't  the  dew  stay  on  till 
after  a  reasonable  breakfast  ?)  and  sprinkle  soot 
on  the  leaves.  I  wonder  if  it  is  I.  Soot  is  so 
much  blacker  than  the  bugs,  that  they  are  dis 
gusted,  and  go  away.  You  can't  get  up  too 
early,  if  you  have  a  garden.  You  must  be  early 
due  yourself,  if  you  get  ahead  of  the  bugs.  I 
think,  that,  on  the  whole,  it  would  be  best  to  sit 
up  all  night,  and  sleep  daytimes.  Things  ap 
pear  to  go  on  in  the  night  in  the  garden  uncom 
monly.  It  would  be  less  trouble  to  stay  up  than 
it  is  to  get  up  so  early. 

I  have  been  setting  out  some  new  raspberries, 
two  sorts,  —  a  silver  and  a  gold  color.  How  fine 
they  will  look  on  the  table  next  year  in  a  cut- 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  33 

glass  dish,  the  cream  being  in  a  ditto  pitcher !  I 
set  them  four  and  five  feet  apart.  I  set  my 
strawberries  pretty  well  apart  also.  The  reason 
is,  to  give  room  for  the  cows  to  run  through 
when  they  break  into  the  garden,  —  as  they  do 
sometimes.  A  cow  needs  a  broader  track  than 
a  locomotive  ;  and  she  generally  makes  one.  I 
am  sometimes  astonished  to  see  how  big  a  space 
in  a  flower-bed  her  foot  will  cover.  The  rasp 
berries  are  called  Doolittle  and  Golden  Cap.  I 
don't  like  the  name  of  the  first  variety,  and,  if 
they  do  much,  shall  change  it  to  Silver  Top. 
You  never  can  tell  what  a  thing  named  Doolittle 
will  do.  The  one  in  the  Senate  changed  color, 
and  got  sour.  They  ripen  badly,  —  either  mil 
dew,  or  rot  on  the  bush.  They  are  apt  to  John- 
sonize, — rot  on  the  stem.  I  shall  watch  the 
Doolittles. 


THIRD    WEEK. 

BELIEVE  that  I  have  found,  if  not 
original  sin,  at  least  vegetable  total  dev 
pravity  in  my  garden  ;  and  it  was  there 
before  I  went  into  it.  It  is  the  bunch,  or  joint, 
or  snake-grass,  —  whatever  it  is  called.  As  I  do 
not  know  the  names  of  all  the  weeds  and  plants, 
I  have  to  do  as  Adam  did  in  his  garden,  —  name 
things  as  I  find  them.  This  grass  has  a  slender, 
beautiful  stalk :  and  when  you  cut  it  down,  of 
pull  up  a  long  root  of  it,  you  fancy  it  is  got  rid 
of;  but  in  a  day  or  two  it  will  come  up  in  the 
same  spot  in  half  a  dozen  vigorous  blades.  Cut 
ting  down  and  pulling  up  is  what  it  thrives  on 
Extermination  rather  helps  it.  If  you  follow  a 


WHAT   I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  35 

slender  white  root,  it  will  be  found  to  run  under 
the  ground  until  it  meets  another  slender  white 
root ;  and  you  will  soon  unearth  a  network  of 
them,  with  a  knot  somewhere,  sending  out  dozens 
of  sharp-pointed,  healthy  shoots,  every  joint  pre 
pared  to  be  an  independent  life  and  plant.  The 
only  way  to  deal  with  it  is  to  take  one  part  hoe 
and  two  parts  fingers,  and  carefully  dig  it  out, 
not  leaving  a  joint  anywhere.  It  will  take  a 
little  time,  say  all  summer,  to  dig  out  thoroughly 
a  small  patch ;  but  if  you  once  dig  it  out,  and 
keep  it  out,  you  will  have  no  further  trouble. 

I  have  said  it  was  total  depravity.  Here  it  is. 
If  you  attempt  to  pull  up  and  root  out  any  sin  in 
you,  which  shows  on  the  surface,  —  if  it  does  not 
show,  you  do  not  care  for  it,  —  you  may  have 
noticed  how  it  runs  into  an  interior  network  of 
sins,  and  an  ever-sprouting  branch  of  them  roots 
somewhere  ;  and  that  you  cannot  pull  out  one 
without  making  a  general  internal  disturbance, 


36  MY   SUMMER   IN   /I    GARDEN. 

and  rooting  up  your  whole  being.  I  suppose  it 
is  less  trouble  to  quietly  cut  them  off  at  the  top 
—  say  once  a  week,  on  Sunday,  when  you  put  on 
your  religious  clothes  and  face,  —  so  that  no  on$ 
will  see  them,  and  not  try  to  eradicate  the  net 
work  within. 

Remark.  —  This  moral  vegetable  figure  is  at 
the  service  of  any  clergyman  who  will  have  the 
manliness  to  come  forward  and  help  me  at  a 
day's  hoeing  on  my  potatoes.  None  but  the 
orthodox  need  apply. 

I,  however,  believe  in  the  intellectual,  if  not 
the  moral,  qualities  of  vegetables,  and  especially 
weeds.  There  was  a  worthless  vine  that  (or 
who)  started  up  about  midway  between  a  grape- 
trellis  and  a  row  of  bean-poles,  some  three  feet 
from  each,  but  a  little  nearer  the  trellis.  When 
ft  came  out  of  the  ground,  it  looked  around  to 
Bee  what  it  should  do.  The  trellis  was  already 
occupied.  The  bean-pole  was  empty.  There 


WHAT   I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  37 

Was  evidently  a  little  the  best  chance  of  light, 
air,  and  sole  proprietorship  on  the  pole.  And 
the  vine  started  for  the  pole,  and  began  to  climb 
it  with  determination.  Here  was  as  distinct  an 
act  of  choice,  of  reason,  as  a  boy  exercises  when 
he  goes  into  a  forest,  and,  looking  about,  decides 
which  tree  he  will  climb.  And,  besides,  how  did 
the  vine  know  enough  to  travel  in  exactly  the 
right  direction,  three  feet,  to  find  what  it  wanted  ? 
This  is  intellect  The  weeds,  on  the  other  hand, 
have  hateful  moral  qualities.  To  cut  down  a 
weed  is,  therefore,  to  do  a  moral  action.  I  feel 
as  if  I  were  destroying  sin.  My  hoe  becomes  an 
instrument  of  retributive  justice.  I  am  an  apos 
tle  of  Nature.  This  view  of  the  matter  lends  a 
dignity  to  the  art  of  hoeing  which  nothing  else 
does,  and  lifts  it  into  the  region  of  ethics.  Hoe" 
ing  becomes,  not  a  pastime,  but  a  duty.  And 
you  get  to  regard  it  so,  as  the  days  and  the 
weeds  lengthen. 


38  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

Observation.  —  Nevertheless,  what  a  man  needs 
in  gardening  is  a  cast-iron  back,  with  a  hinge  in 
it.  The  hoe  is  an  ingenious  instrument,  cal 
culated  to  call  out  a  great  deal  of  strength  at  a 
great  disadvantage. 

The  striped  bug  has  come,  the  saddest  of  the 
year.  He  is  a  moral  double-ender,  iron-clad  at 
that.  He  is  unpleasant  in  two  ways.  He  bur 
rows  in  the  ground  so  that  you  cannot  find  him, 
and  he  flies  away  so  that  you  cannot  catch  him. 
He  is  rather  handsome,  as  bugs  go,  but  utterly 
dastardly,  in  that  he  gnaws  the  stem  of  the  plant 
close  to  the  ground,  and  ruins  it  without  any 
apparent  advantage  to  himself.  I  find  him  on 
the  hills  of  cucumbers  (perhaps  it  will  be  a 
cholera-year,  and  we  shall  not  want  any),  the 
squashes  (small  loss),  and  the  melons  (which 
never  ripen).  The  best  way  to  deal  with  the 
striped  bug  is  to  sit  down  by  the  hills,  and  pa 
tiently  watch  for  him.  If  you  are  spry,  you  can 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  39 

annoy  him.  This,  however,  takes  time.  It  takes 
all  day  and  part  of  the  night.  For  he  flieth  in 
darkness,  and  wasteth  at  noonday.  If  you  get 
up  before  the  dew  is  off  the  plants,  —  it  goes  off 
very  early,  —  you  can  sprinkle  soot  on  the  plant 
(soot  is  my  panacea :  if  I  can  get  the  disease  of 
a  plant  reduced  to  the  necessity  of  soot,  I  am 
all  right)  ;  and  soot  is  unpleasant  to  the  bug. 
But  the  best  thing  to  do  is  to  set  a  toad  to  catch 
the  bugs.  The  toad  at  once  establishes  the  most 
intimate  relations  with  the  bug.  It  is  a  pleasure 
to  see  such  unity  among  the  lower  animals.  The 
difficulty  is  to  make  the  toad  stay  and  watch 
the  hill.  If  you  know  your  toad,  it  is  all  right 
If  you  do  not,  you  must  build  a  tight  fence  round 
the  plants,  which  the  toad  cannot  jump  over. 
This,  however,  introduces  a  new  element.  I  find 
that  I  have  a  zoological  garden  on  my  hands.  It 
is  an  unexpected  result  of  my  little  enterprise, 
which  never  aspired  to  the  completeness  of  the 
Paris  "Jardin  des  Plantes." 


FOURTH    WEEK. 

RTHODOXY  is  at  a  low  ebb.  Only 
two  clergymen  accepted  my  offer  to 
come  and  help  hoe  my  potatoes  for 
the  privilege  of  using  my  vegetable  total-deprav 
ity  figure  about  the  snake-grass,  or  quack-grass 
as  some  call  it ;  and  those  two  did  not  bring 
hoes.  There  seems  to  be  a  lack  of  disposition  to 
hoe  among  our  educated  clergy.  I  am  bound  to 
say  that  these  two,  however,  sat  and  watched  my 
vigorous  combats  with  the  weeds,  and  talked 
most  beautifully  about  the  application  of  the 
snake-grass  figure.  As,  for  instance,  when  a 
fault  or  sin  showed  on  the  surface  of  a  man, 
whether,  if  you  dug  down,  you  would  find  that  it 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  4! 

ran  back  and  into  the  original  organic  bunch  of 
original  sin  within  the  man.  The  dnly  other 
clergyman  who  came  was  from  out  of  town,  —  a 
half  Universalist,  who  said  he  would  n't  give 
twenty  cents  for  my  figure.  He  said  that  the 
snake-grass  was  not  in  my  garden  originally,  that 
it  sneaked  in  under  the  sod,  and  that  it  could  be 
entirely  rooted  out  with  industry  and  patience. 
I  asked  the  Universalist-inclined  man  to  take 
my  hoe  and  try  it ;  but  he  said  he  had  n't  time, 
and  went  away. 

But,  jubilate,  I  have  got  my  garden  all  hoed 
the  first  time  !  I  feel  as  if  I  had  put  down  the 
rebellion.  Only  there  are  guerillas  left  here  and 
there,  about  the  borders  and  in  corners,  unsub 
dued,  —  Forrest  docks,  and  Quantrell  grass,  and 
Beauregard  pig-weeds.  This  first  hoeing  is  a 
gigantic  task :  it  is  your  first  trial  of  strength 
with  the  never-sleeping  forces  of  Nature.  Sev 
eral  times,  in  its  progress,  I  was  tempted  to  do 


42  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

as  Adam  did,  who  abandoned  his  garden  on  ac 
count  of  the  weeds.  (How  much  my  mind 
seems  to  run  upon  Adam,  as  if  there  had  been 
only  two  really  moral  gardens,  —  Adam's  and 
mine !)  The  only  drawback  to  my  rejoicing 
over  the  finishing  of  the  first  hoeing  is,  that  the 
garden  now  wants  hoeing  the  second  time.  I 
suppose,  if  my  garden  were  planted  in  a  perfect 
circle,  and  I  started  round  it  with  a  hoe,  I  should 
never  see  an  opportunity  to  rest.  The  fact  is, 
that  gardening  is  the  old  fable  of  perpetual 
labor  ;  and  I,  for  one,  can  never  forgive  Adam 
Sisyphus,  or  whoever  it  was,  who  let  in  the  roots 
of  discord.  I  had  pictured  myself  sitting  at  eve, 
with  my  family,  in  the  shade  of  twilight,  contem 
plating  a  garden  hoed.  Alas  !  it  is  a  dream  not 
to  be  realized  in  this  world. 

My  mind  has  been  turned  to  the  subject  of 
fruit  and  shade  trees  in  a  garden.  There  are 
those  who  say  that  trees  shade  the  garden  too 


WHAT   I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  43 

much,  and  interfere  with  the  growth  of  the 
vegetables.  There  may  be  something  in  this: 
but  when  I  go  down  the  potato  rows,  the  rays 
of  the  sun  glancing  upon  my  shining  blade,  the 
sweat  pouring  from  my  face,  I  should  be  grateful 
for  shade.  Whar  Is  a  garden  for  ?  The  pleasure 
of  man.  I  should  take  much  more  pleasure  in  a 
shady  garden.  Am  I  to  be  sacrificed,  broiled, 
roasted,  for  the  sake  of  the  increased  vigor  of  a 
few  vegetables  ?  The  thing  is  perfectly  absurd. 
If  I  were  rich,  I  think  I  would  have  my  garden 
covered  with  an  awning,  so  that  it  would  be  com 
fortable  to  work  in  it.  It  might  roll  up  and  be 
removable,  as  the  great  awning  of  the  Roman 
Coliseum  was,  —  not  like  the  Boston  one,  which 
went  off  in  a  high  wind.  Another  very  good 
way  to  do,  and  probably  not  so  expensive  as  the 
awning,  would  be  to  have  four  persons  of  foreign 
birth  carry  a  sort  of  canopy  over  you  as  you 
hoed.  And  there  might  be  a  person  at  each  end 


44  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

of  the  row  with  some  cool  and  refreshing  drink. 
Agriculture  is  still  in  a  very  barbarous  stage.  I 
hope  to  live  yet  to  see  the  day  when  I  can  do 
my  gardening,  as  tragedy  is  done,  to  slow  and 
soothing  music,  and  attended  by  some  of  the 
comforts  I  have  named.  These  things  come  so 
forcibly  into  my  mind  sometimes  as  I  work,  that 
perhaps,  when  a  wandering  breeze  lifts  my  straw 
hat,  or  a  bird  lights  on  a  near  currant-bush,  and 
shakes  out  a  full-throated  summer  song,  I  almost 
expect  to  find  the  cooling  drink  and  the  hospit 
able  entertainment  at  the  end  of  the  row.  But  I 
never  do.  There  is  nothing  to  be  done  but  to 
turn  round,  and  hoe  back  to  the  other  end. 

Speaking  of  those  yellow  squash-bugs,  I  think 
I  disheartened  them  by  covering  the  plants  so 
deep  with  soot  and  wood-ashes  that  they  could 
not  find  them  ;  and  I  am  in  doubt  if  I  shall  ever 
see  the  plants  again.  But  I  have  heard  of 
another  defence  against  the  bugs.  Put  a  fino 


WHAT   I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  4$ 

wire-screen  over  each  hill,  which  will  keep  out 
the  bugs  and  admit  the  rain.  I  should  say  that 
these  screens  would  not  cost  much  more  than 
the  melons  you  would  be  likely  to  get  from  the 
vines  if  you  bought  them ;  but  then  think  of  the 
moral  satisfaction  of  watching  the  bugs  hovering 
over  the  screen,  seeing,  but  unable  to  reach  the 
tender  plants  within.  That  is  worth  paying  for. 
I  left  my  own  garden  yesterday,  and  went  over 
to  where  Polly  was  getting  the  weeds  out  of  one 
of  her  flower-beds.  She  was  working  away  at 
the  bed  with  a  little  hoe.  Whether  women 
ought  to  have  the  ballot  or  not  (and  I  have 
a  decided  opinion  on  that  point,  which  I  should 
here  plainly  give,  did  I  not  fear  that  it  would 
injure  my  agricultural  influence),  I  am  compelled 
to  say  that  this  was  rather  helpless  hoeing.  It 
was  patient,  conscientious,  even  pathetic  hoeing  ; 
but  it  was  neither  effective  nor  finished.  When 
completed,  the  bed  looked  somewhat  as  if  a  hen 


46  MY   SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

had  scratched  it :  there  was  that  touching  un- 
evenness  about  it.  I  think  no  one  could  look  at  it 
and  not  be  affected.  To  be  sure,  Polly  smoothed 
it  off  with  a  rake,  and  asked  me  if  it  was  n't  nice  ; 
and  I  said  it  was.  It  was  not  a  favorable  time 
for  me  to  explain  the  difference  between  putter 
ing  hoeing,  and  the  broad,  free  sweep  of  the 
instrument,  which  kills  the  weeds,  spares  the 
plants,  and  loosens  the  soil  without  leaving  it 
in  holes  and  hills.  But,  after  all,  as  life  is  con 
stituted,  I  think  more  of  Polly's  honest  and 
anxious  care  of  her  plants  than  of  the  most 
finished  gardening  in  the  world. 


FIFTH    WEEK. 


LEFT  my  garden  for  a  week,  just  at  the 
close  of  the  dry  spell.  A  season  of  rain 
immediately  set  in,  and  when  I  returned 
the  transformation  was  wonderful.  In  one  week 
every  vegetable  had  fairly  jumped  forward.  The 
tomatoes  which  I  left  slender  plants,  eaten  of 
bugs  and  debating  whether  they  would  go  back 
ward  or  forward,  had  become  stout  and  lusty, 
with  thick  stems  and  dark  leaves,  and  some  of 
them  had  blossomed.  The  corn  waved  like  that 
which  grows  so  rank  out  of  the  French-English 
mixture  at  Waterloo.  The  squashes —  I  will  not 
speak  of  the  squashes.  The  most  remarkable 
growth  was  the  asparagus.  There  was  not  a 


48  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

spear  above  ground  when  I  went  away ;  and  nov» 
it  had  sprung  up,  and  gone  to  seed,  and  there 
were  stalks  higher  than  my  head.  I  am  entirely 
aware  of  the  value  of  words,  and  of  moral  obli 
gations.  When  I  say  that  the  asparagus  had 
grown  six  feet  in  seven  days,  I  expect  and  wish 
to  be  believed.  I  am  a  little  particular  about 
the  statement ;  for,  if  there  is  any  prize  offered 
for  asparagus  at  the  next  agricultural  fair,  I  wish 
to  compete,  —  speed  to  govern.  What  I  claim  is 
the  fastest  asparagus.  As  for  eating  purposes,  I 
have  seen  better.  A  neighbor  of  mine,  who 
looked  in  at  the  growth  of  the  bed,  said,  "  Well, 

he  'd  be "  :  but  I  told  him  there  was  no  use 

of  affirming  now ;  he  might  keep  his  oath  till  I 
wanted  it  on  the  asparagus  affidavit.  In  order 
to  have  this  sort  of  asparagus,  you  want  to  ma 
nure  heavily  in  the  early  spring,  fork  it  in,  and 
top-dress  (that  sounds  technical)  with  a  thick 
layer  of  chloride  of  sodium :  if  you  cannot  get 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  49 

that,  common  salt  will  do,  and  the  neighbors  will 
never  notice  whether  it  is  the  orthodox  Na.  Cl. 
58.5,  or  not. 

I  scarcely  dare  trust  myself  to  speak  of  the 
weeds.  They  grow  as  if  the  devil  was  in  them. 
I  know  a  lady,  a  member  of  the  church,  and  a 
very  good  sort  of  woman,  considering  the  subject 
condition  of  that  class,  who  says  that  the  weeds 
work  on  her  to  that  extent,  that,  in  going  through 
her  garden,  she  has  the  greatest  difficulty  in 
keeping  the  ten  commandments  in  anything  like 
an  unfractured  condition.  I  asked  her  which 
one,  but  she  said,  all  of  them :  one  felt  like 
breaking  the  whole  lot.  The  sort  of  weed  which 
I  most  hate  (if  I  can  be  said  to  hate  anything 
which  grows  in  my  own  garden)  is  the  "pusley,"  a 
fat,  ground-clinging,  spreading,  greasy  thing,  and 
the  most  propagatious  (it  is  not  my  fault  if  the 
word  is  not  in  the  dictionary)  plant  I  know.  I 
saw  a  Chinaman,  who  came  over  with  a  returned 

3  D 


$O  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

missionary,  and  pretended  to  be  converted,  boil 
a  lot  of  it  in  a  pot,  stir  in  eggs,  and  mix  and  eat 
it  with  relish, —  "Me  likee  he."  It  will  be  a 
good  thing  to  keep  the  Chinamen  on  when  they 
come  to  do  our  gardening.  I  only  fear  they  will 
cultivate  it  at  the  expense  of  the  strawberries 
and  melons.  Who  can  say  that  other  weeds, 
which  we  despise,  may  not  be  the  favorite  food 
of  some  remote  people  or  tribe  ?  We  ought  to 
abate  our  conceit.  It  is  possible  that  we  destroy 
in  our  gardens  that  which  is  really  of  most  value 
in  some  other  place.  Perhaps,  in  like  manner, 
our  faults  and  vices  are  virtues  in  some  remote 
planet.  I  cannot  see,  however,  that  this  thought 
is  of  the  slightest  value  to  us  here,  any  more 
than  weeds  are. 

There  is  another  subject  which  is  forced  upon 
my  notice.  I  like  neighbors,  and  I  like  chick 
ens  ;  but  I  do  not  think  they  ought  to  be  united 
near  a  garden.  Neighbors'  hens  in  your  garden 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  51 

are  an  annoyance.  Even  if  they  did  not  scratch 
up  the  corn,  and  peck  the  strawberries,  and  eat 
the  tomatoes,  it  is  not  pleasant  to  see  them 
straddling  about  in  their  jerky,  high-stepping, 
speculative  manner,  picking  inquisitively  here 
and  there.  It  is  of  no  use  to  tell  the  neighbor 
that  his  hens  eat  your  tomatoes  :  it  makes  no 
impression  on  him,  for  the  tomatoes  are  not  his. 
The  best  way  is  to  casually  remark  to  him  that 
he  has  a  fine  lot  of  chickens,  pretty  well  grown, 
and  that  you  like  spring  chickens  broiled.  He 
will  take  them  away  at  once. 

The  neighbors'  small  children  are  also  out 
of  place  in  your  garden,  in  strawberry  and 
currant  time,  I  hope  I  appreciate  the  value 
of  children.  We  should  soon  come  to  noth 
ing  without  them,  though  the  Shakers  have 
the  best  gardens  in  the  world.  Without  them 
the  common  school  would  languish.  But  the 
problem  is,  what  to  do  with  them  in  a  gar- 


52  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

den.  For  they  are  not  good  to  eat,  and  there 
is  a  law  against  making  away  with  them. 
The  law  is  not  very  well  enforced,  it  is 
true  ;  for  people  do  thin  them  out  with  con 
stant  dosing,  paregoric,  and  soothing-syrups,  and 
scanty  clothing.  But  I,  for  one,  feel  that  it 
would  not  be  right,  aside  from  the  law,  to  take 
the  life,  even  of  the  smallest  child,  for  the  sake 
of  a  little  fruit,  more  or  less,  in  the  garden.  I 
may  be  wrong ;  but  these  are  my  sentiments, 
and  I  am  not  ashamed  of  them.  When  we 
come,  as  Bryant  says  in  his  "  Iliad,"  to  leave 
the  circus  of  this  life,  and  join  that  innumerable 
caravan  which  moves,  it  will  be  some  satisfaction 
to  us,  that  we  have  never,  in  the  way  of  garden 
ing,  disposed  of  even  the  humblest  child  unneces 
sarily.  My  plan  would  be  to  put  them  into  Sun 
day  schools  more  thoroughly,  and  to  give  the 
Sunday  schools  an  agricultural  turn ;  teaching 
the  children  the  sacredness  of  neighbors'  vege- 


WHAT   I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING. 


53 


tables.  I  think  that  our  Sunday  schools  do  not 
sufficiently  impress  upon  children  the  danger, 
from  snakes  and  otherwise,  of  going  into  the 
neighbors'  gardens. 


SIXTH    WEEK. 


OMEBODY  has  sent  me  a  new  sort 
of  hoe,  with  the  wish  that  I  should 
speak  favorably  of  it,  if  I  can  consist 
ently.  I  willingly  do  so,  but  with  the  under 
standing  that  I  am  to  be  at  liberty  to  speak 
just  as  courteously  of  any  other  hoe  which  I 
may  receive.  li  I  understand  religious  morals, 
this  is  the  position  of  the  religious  press  with 
regard  to  bitters  and  wringing-machines.  In 
some  cases,  the  responsibility  of  such  a  recom 
mendation  is  shifted  upon  the  wife  of  the  editor 
or  clergyman.  Polly  says  she  is  entirely  willing 
to  make  a  certificate,  accompanied  with  an  affi 
davit,  with  regard  to  this  hoe  ;  but  her  habit  of 


WHAT   I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  55 

sitting  about  the  garden-walk,  on  an  inverted 
flower-pot,  while  I  hoe,  somewhat  destroys  the 
practical  value  of  her  testimony. 

As  to  this  hoe,  I  do  not  mind  saying  that  it 
has  changed  my  view  of  the  desirableness  and 
value  of  human  life.  It  has,  in  fact,  made  life  a 
holiday  to  me.  It  is  made  on  the  principle  that 
man  is  an  upright,  sensible,  reasonable  being, 
and  not  a  grovelling  wretch.  It  does  away  with 
the  necessity  of  the  hinge  in  the  back.  The 
handle  is  seven  and  a  half  feet  long.  There  are 
two  narrow  blades,  sharp  on  both  edges,  which 
come  together  at  an  obtuse  angle  in  front ;  and 
as  you  walk  along  with  this  hoe  before  you, 
pushing  and  pulling  with  a  gentle  motion,  the 
weeds  fall  at  every  thrust  and  withdrawal,  and 
the  slaughter  is  immediate  and  wide-spread. 
When  I  got  this  hoe  I  was  troubled  with  sleep 
less  mornings,  pains  in  the  back,  kleptomania 
with  regard  to  new  weeders  ;  when  I  went  into 


56  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

my  garden  I  was  always  sure  to  see  something. 
In  this  disordered  state  of  mind  and  body  I  got 
this  hoe.  The  morning  after  a  day  of  using  it  I 
slept  perfectly  and  late.  I  regained  my  respect 
for  the  eighth  commandment.  After  two  doses 
of  the  hoe  in  the  garden,  the  weeds  entirely  dis 
appeared.  Trying  it  a  third  morning,  I  was 
obliged  to  throw  it  over  the  fence  in  order  to 
save  from  destruction  the  green  things  that 
ought  to  grow  in  the  garden.  Of  course,  this  is 
figurative  language.  What  I  mean  is,  that  the 
fascination  of  using  this  hoe  is  such  that  you 
are  sorely  tempted  to  employ  it  upon  your  vege 
tables,  after  the  weeds  are  laid  low,  and  must 
hastily  withdraw  it,  to  avoid  unpleasant  results. 
I  make  this  explanation,  because  I  intend  to 
put  nothing  into  these  agricultural  papers  that 
will  not  bear  the  strictest  scientific  investiga 
tion  ;  nothing  that  the  youngest  child  cannot 
understand  and  cry  for;  nothing  that  the  oldest 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  57 

and  wisest  men  will  not  need  to  study  with 
care. 

I  need  not  add  that  the  care  of  a  garden  with 
this  hoe  becomes  the  merest  pastime.  I  would 
not  be  without  one  for  a  single  night.  The  only 
danger  is,  that  you  may  rather  make  an  idol  of 
the  hoe,  and  somewhat  neglect  your  garden  in 
explaining  it,  and  fooling  about  with  it.  I  almost 
think  that,  with  one  of  these  in  the  hands  of  an 
ordinary  day-laborer,  you  might  see  at  night 
where  he  had  been  working. 

Let  us  have  peas.  I  have  been  a  zealous  ad 
vocate  of  the  birds.  I  have  rejoiced  in  their 
multiplication.  I  have  endured  their  concerts 
at  four  o'clock  in  the  morning  without  a  mur 
mur.  Let  them  come,  I  said,  and  eat  the  worms, 
in  order  that  we,  later,  may  enjoy  the  foliage  and 
the  fruits  of  the  earth.  We  have  a  cat,  a  magnifi 
cent  animal,  of  the  sex  which  votes  (but  not  a 
pole-cat),  —  so  large  and  powerful  that,  if  he 

3* 


$8  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

were  in  the  army,  he  would  be  called  Long 
Tom.  He  is  a  cat  of  fine  disposition,  the  most 
irreproachable  morals  I  ever  saw  thrown  away 
in  a  cat ,  and  a  splendid  hunter.  He  spends  his 
nights,  not  in  social  dissipation,  but  in  gathering 
in  rats,  mice,  flying-squirrels,  and  also  birds. 
When  he  first  brought  me  a  bird,  I  told  him 
that  it  was  wrong,  and  tried  to  convince  him, 
while  he  was  eating  it,  that  he  was  doing  wrong ; 
for  he  is  a  reasonable  cat,  and  understands  pretty 
much  everything  except  the  binomial  theorem 
and  the  time  down  the  cycloidal  arc.  But  with 
no  effect.  The  killing  of  birds  went  on  to  my 
great  regret  and  shame. 

The  other  day  I  went  to  my  garden  to  get  a 
mess  of  peas.  I  had  seen,  the  day  before,  that 
they  were  just  ready  to  pick.  How  I  had  lined 
the  ground,  planted,  hoed,  bushed  them  !  The 
bushes  were  very  fine,  —  seven  feet  high,  and  of 
good  wood:  How  I  had  delighted  in  the  grow- 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  59 

ing,  the  blowing,  the  podding!  What  a  touch 
ing  thought  It  was  that  they  had  all  podded  for 
me!  When  I  went  to  pick  them,  I  found  the 
pods  all  split  open,  and  the  peas  gone.  The  dear 
little  birds,  who  are  so  fond  of  the  strawberries, 
had  eaten  them  all.  Perhaps  there  were  left  as 
many  as  I  planted  :  I  did  not  count  them.  I 
made  a  rapid  estimate  of  the  cost  of  the  seed, 
the  interest  of  the  ground,  the  price  of  labor, 
the  value  of  the  bushes,  the  anxiety  of  weeks  of 
watchfulness.  I  looked  about  me  on  the  face  of 
Nature.  The  wind  blew  from  the  south  so  soft 
and  treacherous !  A  thrush  sang  in  the  woods 
so  deceitfully !  All  Nature  seemed  fair.  But 
who  was  to  give  me  back  my  peas  ?  The  fowls 
of  the  air  have  peas  ;  but  what  has  man  ? 

I  went  into  the  house,  I  called  Calvin.  (That 
is  the  name  of  our  cat,  given  him  on  account 
of  his  gravity,  morality,  and  uprightness.  We 
never  familiarly  call  him  John.)  I  petted  Cal' 


6O  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

vin.  I  lavished  upon  him  an  enthusiastic  fond 
ness.  I  told  him  that  he  had  no  fault ;  that  the 
one  action  that  I  had  called  a  vice  was  an  heroic 
exhibition  of  regard  for  my  interests.  I  bade 
him  go  and  do  likewise  continually.  I  now  saw 
how  much  better  instinct  is  than  mere  unguided 
reason.  Calvin  knew.  If  he  had  put  his  opin 
ion  into  English  (instead  of  his  native  cat 
alogue),  it  would  have  been :  "  You  need  not 
teach  your  grandmother  to  suck  eggs."  It  was 
only  the  round  of  Nature.  The  worms  eat  a  nox 
ious  something  in  the  ground.  The  birds  eat  the 
worms.  Calvin  eats  the  birds.  We  eat  —  no, 
we  do  not  eat  Calvin.  There  the  chain  stops. 
When  you  ascend  the  scale  of  being,  and  come  to 
an  animal  that  is,  like  ourselves,  inedible,  you 
have  arrived  at  a  result  where  you  can  rest.  Let 
us  respect  the  cat.  He  completes  an  edible  chain. 
I  have  little  heart  to  discuss  methods  of  rais 
ing  peas.  It  occurs  to  me  that  I  can  have  an 


'*  Let  us  respect  the  cat"  —  Page  60. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     6l 

iron  pea-bush,  a  sort  of  trellis,  through  which 
I  could  discharge  electricity  at  frequent  inter 
vals,  and  electrify  the  birds  to  death  when  they 
alight :  for  they  stand  upon  my  beautiful  brush 
in  order  to  pick  out  the  peas.  An  apparatus  of 
this  kind,  with  an  operator,  would  cost,  however, 
frbout  as  much  as  the  peas.  A  neighbor  sug 
gests  that  I  might  put  up  a  scarecrow  near  the 
vines,  which  would  keep  the  birds  away.  I  am 
doubtful  about  it :  the  birds  are  too  much  accus 
tomed  to  seeing  a  person  in  poor  clothes  in  the 
garden  to  care  much  for  that.  Another  neigh 
bor  suggests  that  the  birds  do  not  open  the 
pods  ;  that  a  sort  of  blast,  apt  to  come  after 
rain,  splits  the  pods,  and  the  birds  then  eat  the 
peas.  It  may  be  so.  There  seems  to  be  com 
plete  unity  of  action  between  the  blast  and  the 
birds.  But,  good  neighbors,  kind  friends,  I  de 
sire  that  you  will  not  increase,  by  talk,  a  disap 
pointment  which  you  cannot  assuage. 


SEVENTH    WEEK. 


GARDEN  is  an  awful  responsibility. 
You  never  know  what  you  may  be 
aiding  to  grow  in  it.  I  heard  a  ser 
mon,  not  long  ago,  in  which  the  preacher  said 
that  the  Christian,  at  the  moment  of  his  becom 
ing  one,  was  as  perfect  a  Christian  as  he  would 
be  if  he  grew  to  be  an  archangel ;  that  is,  that 
he  would  not  change  thereafter  at  all,  but  only 
develop.  I  do  not  know  whether  this  is  good 
theology,  or  not ;  and  I  hesitate  to  support  it  by 
an  illustration  from  my  garden,  especially  as  I 
do  not  want  to  run  the  risk  of  propagating  error, 
and  I  do  not  care  to  give  away  these  theological 
comparisons  to  clergymen  who  make  me  so  little 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     63 

return  in  the  way  of  labor.  But  I  find,  in  dis 
secting  a  pea-blossom,  that  hidden  in  the  centre 
of  it  is  a  perfect  miniature  pea-pod,  with  the 
peas  all  in  it,  —  as  perfect  a  pea-pod  as  it  will 
ever  be  ;  only  it  is  as  tiny  as  a  chatelaine  orna 
ment.  Maize  and  some  other  things  show  the 
same  precocity.  This  confirmation  of  the  the- 
ologic  theory  is  startling,  and  sets  me  meditating 
upon  the  moral  possibilities  of  my  garden.  I 
may  find  in  it  yet  the  cosmic  egg. 

And,  speaking  of  moral  things,  I  am  half 
determined  to  petition  the  (Ecumenical  Council 
to  issue  a  bull  of  excommunication  against  "  pus- 
ley."  Of  all  the  forms  which  "  error  "  has  taken 
in  this  world,  I  think  that  is  about  the  worst 
In  the  Middle  Ages  the  monks  in  St.  Bernard's 
ascetic  community  at  Clairvaux  excommunicated 
a  vineyard  which  a  less  rigid  monk  had  planted 
near,  so  that  it  bore  nothing.  In  1 1 20  a  bishop 
of  Laon  excommunicated  the  caterpillars  in  his 


64  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

diocese ;  and,  the  following  year,  St.  Bernard 
excommunicated  the  flies  in  the  Monastery  of 
Foigny ;  and  in  1510  the  ecclesiastical  court 
pronounced  the  dread  sentence  against  the  rats 
of  Autun,  Macon,  and  Lyons.  These  examples 
are  sufficient  precedents.  It  will  be  well  for  the 
council,  however,  not  to  publish  the  bull  either 
just  before  or  just  after  a  rain ;  for  nothing  can 
kill  this  pestilent  heresy  when  the  ground  is 
wet. 

It  is  the  time  of  festivals.  Polly  says  we 
ought  to  have  one,  —  a  strawberry-festival.  She 
says  they  are  perfectly  delightful :  it  is  so  nice  to 
get  people  together  !  —  this  hot  weather.  They 
create  such  a  good  feeling  !  I  myself  am  very 
fond  of  festivals.  I  always  go,  —  when  I  can 
consistently.  Besides  the  strawberries,  there  are 
ice-creams  and  cake  and  lemonade,  and  that  sort 
of  thing  :  and  one  always  feels  so  well  the  next 
day  after  such  a  diet !  But  as  social  reunions, 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.      65 

if  there  are  good  things  to  eat,  nothing  can  be 
pleasanter  ;  and  they  are  very  profitable,  if  you 
have  a  good  object.  I  agreed  that  we  ought  to 
have  a  festival  ;  but  I  did  not  know  what  object 
to  devote  it  to.  We  are  not  in  need  of  an  organ, 
nor  of  any  pulpit-cushions.  I  do  not  know  that 
they  use  pulpit-cushions  now  as  much  as  they 
used  to,  when  preachers  had  to  have  something 
soft  to  pound,  so  that  they  would  not  hurt  their 
fists.  I  suggested  pocket-handkerchiefs,  and 
flannels  for  next  winter.  But  Polly  says  that 
will  not  do  at  all.  You  must  have  some  chari 
table  object,  —  something  that  appeals  to  a  vast 
sense  of  something  ;  something  that  it  will  be 
right  to  get  up  lotteries  and  that  sort  of  thing 
for.  I  suggest  a  festival  ibr  the  benefit  of  my 
garden  ;  and  this  seems  feasible.  In  order  to 
make  everything  pass  off  pleasantly,  invited 
guests  will  bring  or  send  their  own  strawberries 
and  cream,  which  I  shall  be  happy  to  sell  to 

E 


66  MY   SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

them  at  a  slight  advance.  There  are  a  great 
many  improvements  which  the  garden  needs  ; 
among  them  a  sounding-board,  so  that  the  neigh 
bors'  children  can  hear  when  I  tell  them  to  get 
a  little  farther  off  from  the  currant-bushes.  I 
should  also  like  a  selection  from  the  ten  com 
mandments,  in  big  letters,  posted  up  conspicu 
ously,  and  a  few  traps,  that  will  detain,  but  not 
maim,  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  cannot  read. 
But  what  is  most  important  is,  that  the  ladies 
should  crochet  nets  to  cover  over  the  straw 
berries.  A  good-sized,  well-managed  festival 
ought  to  produce  nets  enough  to  cover  my  entire- 
beds  ;  and  I  can  think  of  no  other  method  of 
preserving  the  berries  from  the  birds  next  year. 
I  wonder  how  many  strawberries  it  would  need 
for  a  festival,  and  whether  they  would  cost  more 
than  the  nets. 

I  am  more  and  more  impressed,  as  the  sum 
mer  goes  on,  with  the  inequality  of  man's  fight 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.      6/ 

with  Nature  ;  especially  in  a  civilized  state.  In 
savagery,  it  does  not  so  much  matter  ;  for  one 
does  not  take  a  square  hold,  and  put  out  his 
strength,  but  rather  accommodates  himself  to 
the  situation,  and  takes  what  he  can  get,  without 
raising  any  dust,  or  putting  himself  into  ever 
lasting  opposition.  But  the  minute  he  begins  to 
clear  a  spot  larger  than  he  needs  to  sleep  in  for 
a  night,  and  to  try  to  have  his  own  way  in  the 
least,  Nature  is  at  once  up,  and  vigilant,  and 
contests  him  at  every  step  with  all  her  ingenu 
ity  and  unwearied  vigor.  This  talk  of  subduing 
Nature  is  pretty  much  nonsense.  I  do  not  in 
tend  to  surrender  in  the  midst  of  the  summer 
campaign,  yet  I  cannot  but  think  how  much 
more  peaceful  my  relations  would  now  be  with 
the  primal  forces,  if  I  had  let  Nature  make  the 
garden  according  to  her  own  notion.  (This  is 
written  with  the  thermometer  at  ninety  degrees, 
and  the  weeds  starting  up  with  a  freshness  and 


68  MY   SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

vigor,  as  if  they  had  just  thought  of  it  for  the 
first  time,  and  had  not  been  cut  down  and 
dragged  out  every  other  day  since  the  snow 
went  off.) 

We  have  got  down  the  forests,  and  extermi 
nated  savage  beasts  ;  but  Nature  is  no  more  sub 
dued  than  before  :  she  only  changes  her  tactics, 
—  uses  smaller  guns,  so  to  speak.  She  re-en 
forces  herself  with  a  variety  of  bugs,  worms,  and 
vermin,  and  weeds,  unknown  to  the  savage  state, 
in  order  to  make  war  upon  the  things  of  our 
planting  ;  and  calls  in  the  fowls  of  the  air,  just 
as  we  think  the  battle  is  won,  to  snatch  away 
the  booty.  When  one  gets  almost  weary  of  the 
struggle,  she  is  as  fresh  as  at  the  beginning,  — 
just,  in  fact,  ready  for  the  fray.  I,  for  my  part, 
begin  to  appreciate  the  value  of  frost  and  snow  ; 
for  they  give  the  husbandman  a  little  peace,  and 
enable  him,  for  a  season,  to  contemplate  his  in 
cessant  foe  subdued.  I  do  not  wonder  that  the 


WHAT    I   KNOW    ABOUT    GARDENING.  69 

tropical  people,  where  Nature  never  goes  to 
sleep,  give  it  up,  and  sit  in  lazy  acquiescence. 
Here  I  have  been  working  all  the  season  to 
make  a  piece  of  lawn.  It  had  to  be  graded  and 
sowed  and  rolled  ;  and  I  have  been  shaving  it 
like  a  barber.  When  it  was  soft,  everything  had 
a  tendency  to  go  on  to  it,  —  cows,  and  especially 
wandering  hackmen.  Hackmen  (who  are  a  pro 
duct  of  civilization)  know  a  lawn  when  they  see 
it.  They  rather  have  a  fancy  for  it,  and  always 
try  to  drive  so  as  to  cut  the  sharp  borders  of  it, 
and  leave  the  marks  of  their  wheels  in  deep  ruts 
of  cut-up,  ruined  turf.  The  other  morning,  I 
had  just  been  running  the  mower  over  the  lawn, 
and  stood  regarding  its  smoothness,  when  I  no 
ticed  one,  two,  three  puffs  of  fresh  earth  in  it ; 
and,  hastening  thither,  I  found  that  the  mole  had 
arrived  to  complete  the  work  of  the  hackmen. 
In  a  half-hour  he  had  rooted  up  the  ground  like 
a  pig.  I  found  his  run-ways.  I  waited  for  him 


7O  MY   SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

with  a  spade.  He  did  not  appear  ;  but,  the  next 
time  I  passed  by,  he  had  ridged  the  ground  in 
all  directions,  —  a  smooth,  beautiful  animal,  with 
fur  like  silk,  if  you  could  only  catch  him.  He 
appears  to  enjoy  the  lawn  as  much  as  the  hack- 
men  did.  He  does  not  care  how  smooth  it  is. 
He  is  constantly  mining,  and  ridging  it  up.  I 
am  not  sure  but  he  could  be  countermined.  I 
have  half  a  mind  to  put  powder  in  here  and 
there,  and  blow  the  whole  thing  into  the  air. 
Some  folks  set  traps  for  the  mole  ;  but  my  moles 
never  seem  to  go  twice  in  the  same  place.  I  am 
not  sure  but  it  would  bother  them  to  sow  the 
lawn  with  interlacing  snake-grass  (the  botanical 
name  of  which,  somebody  writes  me,  is  devil- 
grass  :  the  first  time  I  have  heard  that  the  Devil 
has  a  botanical  name),  which  would  worry  them, 
if  it  is  as  difficult  for  them  to  get  through  it  as  it 
is  for  me. 

I  do  not  speak  of  this  mole  in  any  tone  of 


WHAT    I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  7 1 

complaint.  He  is  only  a  part  of  the  untiring 
resources  which  Nature  brings  against  the  hum 
ble  gardener.  I  desire  to  write  nothing  against 
him  which  I  should  wish  to  recall  at  the  last,  — 
nothing  foreign  to  the  spirit  of  that  beautiful 
saying  of  the  dying  boy,  "  He  had  no  copy-book, 
which,  dying,  he  was  sorry  he  had  blotted." 


EIGHTH     WEEK. 

Y  garden  has  been  visited  by  a  High 
Official  Person.  President  G — nt 
was  here  just  before  the  Fourth, 
getting  his  mind  quiet  for  that  event  by  a  few 
days  of  retirement,  staying  with  a  friend  at  the 
head  of  our  street ;  and  I  asked  him  if  he  would 
n't  like  to  come  down  our  way  Sunday  afternoon, 
and  take  a  plain,  simple  look  at  my  garden,  eat 
a  little  lemon  ice-cream  and  jelly-cake,  and  drink 
a  glass  of  native  lager-bier.  I  thought  of  put 
ting  up  over  my  gate,  "  Welcome  to  the  Nation's 
Gardener  "  ;  but  I  hate  nonsense,  and  did  n't  do 
it.  I,  however,  hoed  diligently  on  Saturday : 
what  weeds  I  could  n't  remove  I  buried,  so  that 


WHAT    I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING  73 

everything  would  look  all  right.  The  borders 
of  my  drive  were  trimmed  with  scissors  ;  and 
everything  that  could  offend  the  Eye  of  the 
Great  was  hustled  out  of  the  way. 

In  relating  this  interview,  it  must  be  distinctly 
understood  that  I  am  not  responsible  for  any 
thing  that  the  President  said  ;  nor  is  he,  either. 
He  is  not  a  great  speaker  ;  but  whatever  he  says 
has  an  esoteric  and  an  exoteric  meaning ;  and 
some  of  his  remarks  about  my  vegetables  went 
very  deep.  I  said  nothing  to  him  whatever 
about  politics,  at  which  he  seemed  a  good  deal 
surprised:  he  said  it  was  the  first  garden  he 
had  ever  been  in,  with  a  man,  when  the  talk 
was  not  of  appointments.  I  told  him  that  this 
was  purely  vegetable  ;  after  which  he  seemed 
more  at  his  ease,  and,  in  fact,  delighted  with 
everything  he  saw.  He  was  much  interested  in 
my  strawberry-beds,  asked  what  varieties  I  had, 
and  requested  me  to  send  him  some  seed.  He 
4 


74  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

said  the  patent-office  seed  was  as  difficult  to  raise 
as  an  appropriation  for  the  St.  Domingo  business. 
The  playful  bean  seemed  also  to  please  him  ; 
and  he  said  he  had  never  seen  such  impres 
sive  corn  and  potatoes  at  this  time  of  year  ;  that 
it  was  to  him  an  unexpected  pleasure,  and  one 
of  the  choicest  memories  that  he  should  take 
away  with  him  of  his  visit  to  New  England. 

N.  B.  —  That  corn  and  those  potatoes  which 
General  Gr — nt  looked  at  I  will  sell  for  seed,  at 
five  dollars  an  ear,  and  one  dollar  a  potato. 
Office-seekers  need  not  apply. 

Knowing  the  President's  great  desire  for  peas, 
I  kept  him  from  that  part  of  the  garden  where 
the  vines  grow.  But  they  could  not  be  con 
cealed.  Those  who  say  that  the  President  is 
not  a  man  easily  moved  are  knaves  or  fools. 
When  he  saw  my  pea-pods,  ravaged  by  the 
birds,  he  burst  into  tears.  A  man  of  war,  he 
knows  the  value  of  peas.  I  told  him  they  were 


He  burst  into  tears"  —  Page  74. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     75 

an  excellent  sort,  "  The  Champion  of  England." 
As  quick  as  a  flash  he  said,  — 

"  Why  don't  you  call  them  '  The  Reverdy 
Johnson ' ? " 

It  was  a  very  clever  bon-mot ;  but  I  changed 
the  subject. 

The  sight  of  my  squashes,  with  stalks  as  big 
as  speaking-trumpets,  restored  the  President  to 
his  usual  spirits.  He  said  the  summer  squash 
was  the  most  ludicrous  vegetable  he  knew.  It 
was  nearly  all  leaf  and  blow,  with  only  a  sickly, 
crook-necked  fruit  after  a  mighty  fuss.  It  re 
minded  him  of  the  member  of  Congress  from 
;  but  I  hastened  to  change  the  subject. 

As  we  walked  along,  the  keen  eye  of  the 
President  rested  upon  some  handsome  sprays  of 
"  pusley,"  which  must  have  grown  up  since  Sat 
urday  night.  It  was  most  fortunate  ;  for  it  led 
his  Excellency  to  speak  of  the  Chinese  problem. 
He  said  he  had  been  struck  with  one  coupling 


76  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

of  the  Chinese  and  "  pusley  "  in  one  of  my  agri 
cultural  papers  ;  and  it  had  a  significance  more 
far-reaching  than  I  had  probably  supposed.  He 
had  made  the  Chinese  problem  a  special  study. 
He  said  that  I  was  right  in  saying  that  "  pusley  " 
was  the  natural  food  of  the  Chinaman,  and  that 
where  the  "  pusley  "  was  there  would  the  China 
man  be  also.  For  his  part,  he  welcomed  the 
Chinese  emigration  :  we  needed  the  Chinaman 
in  our  gardens  to  eat  the  "  pusley " ;  and  he 
thought  the  whole  problem  solved  by  this  simple 
consideration.  To  get  rid  of  rats  and  "  pusley," 
he  said,  was  a  necessity  of  our  civilization.  He 
did  not  care  so  much  about  the  shoe-business; 
he  did  not  think  that  the  little  Chinese  shoes 
that  he  had  seen  would  be  of  service  in  the 
army  :  but  the  garden-interest  was  quite  another 
affair.  We  want  to  make  a  garden  of  our  whole 
country  :  the  hoe,  in  the  hands  of  a  man  truly 
great,  he  was  pleased  to  say,  was  mightier  than 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.      // 

the  pen.  He  presumed  that  General  B — tl — r 
had  never  taken  into  consideration  the  garden- 
question,  or  he  would  not  assume  the  position 
he  does  with  regard  to  the  Chinese  emigration. 
He  would  let  the  Chinese  come,  even  if  B — tl — r 
had  to  leave,  I  thought  he  was  going  to  say,  but 
I  changed  the  subject. 

During  our  entire  garden  interview  (operati- 
cally  speaking,  the  garden-scene),  the  President 
was  not  smoking.  I  do  not  know  how  the  im 
pression  arose  that  he  "  uses  tobacco  in  any 
form  "  ;  for  I  have  seen  him  several  times,  and 
he  was  not  smoking.  Indeed,  I  offered  him  a 
Connecticut  six  ;  but  he  wittily  said  that  he  did 
not  like  a  weed  in  a  garden,  —  a  remark  which 
I  took  to  have  a  personal  political  bearing,  and 
changed  the  subject. 

The  President  was  a  good  deal  surprised  at 
the  method  and  fine  appearance  of  my  garden, 
and  to  learn  that  I  had  the  sole  care  of  it.  He 


78  MY    SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

asked  me  if  I  pursued  an  original  course,  or 
whether  I  got  my  ideas  from  writers  on  the  sub 
ject.  I  told  him  that  I  had  had  no  time  to  read 
anything  on  the  subject  since  I  began  to  hoe, 
except  "  Loth  air,"  from  which  I  got  my  ideas  of 
landscape-gardening  ;  and  that  I  had  worked  the 
garden  entirely  according  to  my  own  notions, 
except  that  I  had  borne  in  mind  his  injunction, 
"to  fight  it  out  on  this  line  if — "  The  President 
stopped  me  abruptly,  and  said  it  was  unneces 
sary  to  repeat  that  remark  :  he  thought  he  had 
heard  it  before.  Indeed,  he  deeply  regretted 
that  he  had  ever  made  it.  Sometimes,  he  said, 
after  hearing  it  in  speeches,  and  coming  across 
it  in  resolutions,  and  reading  it  in  newspapers, 
and  having  it  dropped  jocularly  by  facetious 
politicians,  who  were  boring  him  for  an  office, 
about  twenty-five  times  a  day,  say  for  a  monthl 
it  would  get  to  running  through  his  head,  like 
the  "  shoo-fly  "  song  which  B — tl — r  sings  in  the 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  79 

House,  until  it  did  seem  as  if  he  should  go  dis 
tracted.  He  said,  no  man  could  stand  that  kind 
of  sentence  hammering  on  his  brain  for  years. 

The  President  was  so  much  pleased  with  my 
management  of  the  garden,  that  he  offered  me 
(at  least,  I  so  understood  him)  the  position  of 
head  gardener  at  the  White  House,  to  have  care 
of  the  exotics.  I  told  him  that  I  thanked  him, 
but  that  I  did  not  desire  any  foreign  appoint 
ment.  I  had  resolved,  when  the  administration 
came  in,  not  to  take  an  appointment ;  and  I 
had  kept  my  resolution.  As  to  any  home  office, 
I  was  poor,  but  honest ;  and,  of  course,  it  would 
be  useless  for  me  to  take  one.  The  President 
mused  a  moment,  and  then  smiled,  and  said  he 
would  see  what  could  be  done  for  me.  I  did 
not  change  the  subject ;  but  nothing  further  was 
said  by  General  Gr — nt. 

The  President  is  a  great  talker  (contrary  to 
the  general  impression) ;  but  I  think  he  appre- 


8O  MY    SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

ciated  his  quiet  hour  in  my  garden.  He  said  it 
carried  him  back  to  his  youth  farther  than  any 
thing  he  had  seen  lately.  He  looked  forward 
with  delight  to  the  time  when  he  could  again 
have  his  private  garden,  grow  his  own  lettuce 
and  tomatoes,  and  not  have  to  get  so  much 
"  sarce  "  from  Congress. 

The  chair  in  which  the  President  sat,  while 
declining  to  take  a  glass  of  lager,  I  have  had 
destroyed,  in  order  that  no  one  may  sit  in  it 
It  was  the  only  way  to  save  it,  if  I  may  so  speak. 
It  would  have  been  impossible  to  keep  it  from 
use  by  any  precautions.  There  are  people  who 
would  have  sat  in  it,  if  the  seat  had  been  set 
with  iron  spikes.  Such  is  the  adoration  of 
Station. 


NINTH    WEEK. 

AM  more  and  more  impressed  with  the 
moral  qualities  of  vegetables,  and  con 
template  forming  a  science  which  shall 
rank  with  comparative  anatomy  and  compara 
tive  philology,  —  the  science  of  comparative 
vegetable  morality.  We  live  in  an  age  of  pro 
toplasm.  And,  if  life-matter  is  essentially  the 
same  in  all  forms  of  life,  I  purpose  to  begin 
early,  and  ascertain  the  nature  of  the  plants  for 
which  I  am  responsible.  I  will  not  associate 
with  any  vegetable  which  is  disreputable,  or  has 
not  some  quality  that  can  contribute  to  my 
moral  growth.  I  do  not  care  to  be  seen  much 
with  the  squashes  or  the  dead-beets.  Fortu- 
4*  F 


82  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

nately  I  can  cut  down  any  sorts  I  do  not  like 
with  the  hoe,  and,  probably,  commit  no  more 
sin  in  so  doing  than  the  Christians  did  in 
hewing  down  the  Jews  in  the  Middle  Ages. 

This  matter  of  vegetable  rank  has  not  been 
at  all  studied  as  it  should  be.  Why  do  we 
respect  some  vegetables,  and  despise  others, 
when  all  of  them  come  to  an  equal  honor  or 
ignominy  on  the  table  ?  The  bean  is  a  grace 
ful,  confiding,  engaging  vine  ;  but  you  never  can 
put  beans  into  poetry,  nor  into  the  highest  sort 
of  prose.  There  is  no  dignity  in  the  bean. 
Corn,  which,  in  my  garden,  grows  alongside 
the  bean,  and,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  with  no 
affectation  of  superiority,  is,  however,  the  child 
of  song.  It  waves  in  all  literature.  But  mix 
it  with  beans,  and  its  high  tone  is  gone.  Suc 
cotash  is  vulgar.  It  is  the  bean  in  it.  The 
bean  is  a  vulgar  vegetable,  without  culture,  or 
any  flavor  of  high  society  among  vegetables, 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     83 

Then  there  is  the  cool  cucumber,  like  so  many 
people,  —  good  for  nothing  when  it  is  ripe  and 
the  wildness  has  gone  out  of  it.  How  inferior 
in  quality  it  is  to  the  melon,  which  grows  upon 
a  similar  vine,  is  of  a  like  watery  consistency, 
but  is  not  half  so  valuable  !  The  cucumber  is 
a  sort  of  low  comedian  in  a  company  where  the 
melon  is  a  minor  gentleman.  I  might  also  con 
trast  the  celery  with  the  potato.  The  associa 
tions  are  as  opposite  as  the  dining-room  of  the 
duchess  and  the  cabin  of  the  peasant.  I  admire 
the  potato,  both  in  vine  and  blossom ;  but  it  is 
not  aristocratic.  I  began  digging  my  potatoes, 
by  the  way,  about  the  4th  of  July  ;  and  I  fancy 
I  have  discovered  the  right  way  to  do  it.  I 
treat  the  potato  just  as  I  would  a  cow.  I  do 
not  pull  them  up,  and  shake  them  out,  and  de 
stroy  them  ;  but  I  dig  carefully  at  the  side  of 
the  hill,  remove  the  fruit  which  is  grown,  leaving 
the  vine  undisturbed  :  and  my  theory  is,  that  it 


84  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

will  go  on  bearing,  and  submitting  to  my  exac 
tions,  until  the  frost  cuts  it  down.  It  is  a  game 
that  one  would  not  undertake  with  a  vegetable 
of  tone. 

The  lettuce  is  to  me  a  most  interesting  study. 
Lettuce  is  like  conversation :  it  must  be  fresh  and 
crisp,  so  sparkling  that  you  scarcely  notice  the 
bitter  in  it.  Lettuce,  like  most  talkers,  is,  how 
ever,  apt  to  run  rapidly  to  seed.  Blessed  is  that 
sort  which  comes  to  a  head,  and  so  remains,  like 
a  few  people  I  know  ;  growing  more  solid  and 
satisfactory  and  tender  at  the  same  time,  and 
whiter  at  the  centre,  and  crisp  in  their  maturity. 
Lettuce,  like  conversation,  requires  a  good  deal 
of  oil,  to  avoid  friction,  and  keep  the  com 
pany  smooth  ;  a  pinch  of  attic  salt ;  a  dash  of 
pepper  ;  a  quantity  of  mustard  and  vinegar,  by 
all  means,  but  so  mixed  that  you  will  notice  no 
sharp  contrasts  ;  and  a  trifle  of  sugar.  You  can 
put  anything,  and  the  more  things  the  better,  into 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     85 

salad,  as  into  a  conversation  ;  but  everything 
depends  upon  the  skill  of  mixing.  I  feel  that  I 
am  in  the  best  society  when  I  am  with  lettuce. 
It  is  in  the  select  circle  of  vegetables.  The 
tomato  appears  well  on  the  table  ;  but  you  do 
not  want  to  ask  its  origin.  It  is  a  most  agree 
able  parvenu.  Of  course,  I  have  said  nothing 
about  the  berries.  They  live  in  another  and 
more  ideal  region  ;  except,  perhaps,  the  currant. 
Here  we  see,  that,  even  among  berries,  there  are 
degrees  of  breeding.  The  currant  is  well  enough, 
clear  as  truth,  and  exquisite  in  color  ;  but  I  ask 
you  to  notice  how  far  it  is  from  the  exclusive 
hauteur  of  the  aristocratic  strawberry,  and  the 
native  refinement  of  the  quietly  elegant  raspberry. 
I  do  not  know  that  chemistry,  searching  for 
protoplasm,  is  able  to  discover  the  tendency  of 
vegetables.  It  can  only  be  found  out  by  outward 
observation.  I  confess  that  I  am  suspicious  .of 
the  bean,  for  instance.  There  are  signs  in  it 


36  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

of  an  unregulated  life.  I  put  up  the  most  at 
tractive  sort  of  poles  for  my  Limas.  They 
stand  high  and  straight,  like  church-spires,  in 
my  theological  garden,  —  lifted  up  ;  and  some 
of  them  have  even  budded,  like  Aaron's  rod. 
No  church-steeple  in  a  New-England  village 
was  ever  better  fitted  to  draw  to  it  the  rising 
generation  on  Sundayy  than  those  poles  to  lift 
up  my  beans  towards  heaven.  Some  of  them 
did  run  up  the  sticks  seven  feet,  and  then  strag 
gled  off  into  the  air  in  a  wanton  manner  ;  but 
more  than  half  of  them  went  galivanting  off  to 
the  neighboring  grape-trellis,  and  wound  their 
tendrils  with  the  tendrils  of  the  grape,  with  a 
disregard  of  the  proprieties  of  life  which  is  a 
satire  upon  human  nature.  And  the  grape  is 
morally  no  better.  I  think  the  ancients,  who 
were  not  troubled  with  the  recondite  mystery  of 
protoplasm,  were  right  in  the  mythic  union  of 
Bacchus  and  Venus. 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  8/ 

Talk  about  the  Darwinian  theory  of  develop 
ment,  and  the  principle  of  natural  selection  !  I 
should  like  to  see  a  garden  let  to  run  in  accord 
ance  with  it.  If  I  had  left  my  vegetables  and 
weeds  to  a  free  fight,  in  which  the  strongest 
specimens  only  should  come  to  maturity,  and 
the  weaker  go  to  the  wall,  I  can  clearly  see 
that  I  should  have  had  a  pretty  mess  of  it.  It 
would  have  been  a  scene  of  passion  and  license 
and  brutality.  The  "  pusley  "  would  have  stran 
gled  the  strawberry  ;  the  upright  corn,  which 
has  now  ears  to  hear  the  guilty  beating  of  the 
hearts  of  the  children  who  steal  the  raspberries, 
would  have  been  dragged  to  the  earth  by  the 
wandering  bean ;  the  snake-grass  would  have 
left  no  place  for  the  potatoes  under  ground  ; 
and  the  tomatoes  would  have  been  swamped  by 
the  lusty  weeds.  With  a  firm  hand,  I  have  had 
to  make  my  own  "  natural  selection."  Nothing 
will  so  well  bear  watching  as  a  garden,  except  a 


88  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

family  of  children  next  door.  Their  power  of 
selection  beats  mine.  If  they  could  read  half 
as  well  as  they  can  steal  awhile  away,  I  should 
put  up  a  notice,  "  Children,  beware  !  There  is 
Protoplasm  here?  But  I  suppose  it  would  have 
no  effect.  I  believe  they  would  eat  protoplasm 
as  quick  as  anything  else,  ripe  or  green.  I  won 
der  if  this  is  going  to  be  a  cholera-year.  Con 
siderable  cholera  is  the  only  thing  that  would 
let  my  apples  and  pears  ripen.  Of  course  I  do 
not  care  for  the  fruit ;  but  I  do  not  want  to  take 
the  responsibility  of  letting  so  much  "life-matter," 
full  of  crude  and  even  wicked  vegetable-human 
tendencies,  pass  into  the  composition  of  the 
neighbors'  children,  some  of  whom  may  be  as 
immortal  as  snake-grass.  There  ought  to  be  a 
public  meeting  about  this,  and  resolutions,  and 
perhaps  a  clam-bake.  At  least,  it  ought  to  be 
put  into  the  catechism,  and  put  in  strong. 


1  /  fried  the  scare-crow  plan.''''  —  Page  89. 


TENTH    WEEK. 

THINK  I  have  discovered  the  way  to 
keep  peas  from  the  birds.  I  tried  the 
scarecrow  plan,  in  a  way  which  I 
thought  would  outwit  the  shrewdest  bird.  The 
brain  of  the  bird  is  not  large  ;  but  it  is  all  con 
centrated  on  one  object,  and  that  is  the  attempt 
to  elude  the  devices  of  modern  civilization  which 
injure  his  chances  of  food.  I  knew  that,  if  I 
put  up  a  complete  stuffed  man,  the  bird  would 
detect  the  imitation  at  once  :  the  perfection  of 
the  thing  would  show  him  that  it  was  a  trick. 
People  always  overdo  the  matter  when  they  at 
tempt  deception.  I  therefore  hung  some  loose 
garments,  of  a  bright  color,  upon  a  rake-head, 


9O  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

and  set  them  up  among  the  vines.  The  suppose 
tion  was,  that  the  bird  would  think  there  was  an 
effort  to  trap  him,  that  there  was  a  man  behind, 
holding  up  these  garments,  and  would  sing,  as  he 
kept  at  a  distance,  "  You  can't  catch  me  with 
any  such  double  device."  The  bird  would  know, 
or  think  he  knew,  that  I  would  not  hang  up  such 
a  scare,  in  the  expectation  that  it  would  pass  for 
a  man,  and  deceive  a  bird  ;  and  he  would  thfre- 
fore  look  for  a  deeper  plot.  I  expected  to  out 
wit  the  bird  by  a  duplicity  that  was  simplicity 
itself.  I  may  have  over-calculated  the  sagacity 
and  reasoning  power  of  the  bird.  At  any  rate,  I 
did  over-calculate  the  amount  of  peas  I  should 
gather. 

But  my  game  was  only  half  played.  In  an 
other  part  of  the  garden  were  other  peas,  grow 
ing  and  blowing.  To  these  I  took  good  care  not 
to  attract  the  attention  of  the  bird  by  any  scare 
crow  whatever !  I  left  the  old  scarecrow  con- 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  9 1 

spicuously  flaunting  above  the  old  vines  ;  and  by 
this  means  I  hope  to  keep  the  attention  of  the 
birds  confined  to  that  side  of  the  garden.  I  am 
convinced  that  this  is  the  true  use  of  a  scare 
crow  :  it  is  a  lure,  and  not  a  warning.  If  you 
wish  to  save  men  from  any  particular  vice,  set 
up  a  tremendous  cry  of  warning  about  some 
other  ;  and  they  will  all  give  their  special  efforts 
to  the  one  to  which  attention  is  called.  This 
profound  truth  is  about  the  only  thing  I  have 
yet  realized  out  of  my  pea-vines. 

However,  the  garden  does  begin  to  yield.  I 
know  of  nothing  that  makes  one  feel  more  com 
placent,  in  these  July  days,  than  to  have  his 
vegetables  from  his  own  garden.  What  an  ef 
fect  it  has  on  the  market-man  and  the  butcher ! 
It  is  a  kind  of  declaration  of  independence. 
The  market-man  shows  me  his  peas  and  beets 
and  tomatoes,  and  supposes  he  shall  send  me  out 
some  with  the  meat.  "  No,  I  thank  you,"  I  say 


92  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

carelessly  :  "  I  am  raising  my  own  this  year." 
Whereas  I  have  been  wont  to  remark,  "  Your 
vegetables  look  a  little  wilted  this  weather,"  I 
now  say,  "  What  a  fine  lot  of  vegetables  you  Ve 
got !  "  When  a  man  is  not  going  to  buy,  he  can 
afford  to  be  generous.  To  raise  his  own  vege 
tables  makes  a  person  feel,  somehow,  more  lib 
eral.  I  think  the  butcher  is  touched  by  the  in 
fluence,  and  cuts  off  a  better  roast  for  me.  The 
butcher  is  my  friend  when  he  sees  that  I  am  not 
wholly  dependent  on  him. 

It  is  at  home,  however,  that  the  effect  is  most 
marked,  though  sometimes  in  a  way  that  I  had 
not  expected.  I  have  never  read  of  any  Roman 
supper  that  seemed  to  me  equal  to  a  dinner  of 
my  own  vegetables  ;  when  everything  on  the 
table  is  the  product  of  my  own  labor,  except 
the  clams,  which  I  have  not  been  able  to  raise 
yet,  and  the  chickens,  which  have  withdrawn 
from  the  garden  just  when  they  were  most  at- 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  93 

tractive.  It  is  strange  what  a  taste  you  sud 
denly  have  for  things  you  never  liked  before. 
The  squash  has  always  been  to  me  a  dish  of 
contempt ;  but  I  eat  it  now  as  if  it  were  my 
best  friend.  I  never  cared  for  the  beet  or  the 
bean  ;  but  I  fancy  now  that  I  could  eat  them  all, 
tops  and  all,  so  completely  have  they  been  trans 
formed  by  the  soil  in  which  they  grew.  I  think 
the  squash  is  less  squashy,  and  the  beet  has  a 
deeper  hue  of  rose,  for  my  care  of  them. 

I  had  begun  to  nurse  a  good  deal  of  pride  in 
presiding  over  a  table  whereon  was  the  fruit  of 
my  honest  industry.  But  woman !  — John  Stuart 
Mill  is  right  when  he  says  that  we  do  not  know 
anything  about  women.  Six  thousand  years  is 
as  one  day  with  them.  I  thought  I  had  some 
thing  to  do  with  those  vegetables.  But  when  I 
saw  Polly  seated  at  her  side  of  the  table,  presid 
ing  over  the  new  and  susceptible  vegetables, 
flanked  by  the  squash  and  the  beans,  and  smil- 


94  MY    SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

ing  upon  the  green  corn  and  the  new  potatoes, 
as  cool  as  the  cucumbers  which  lay  sliced  in  ice 
before  her,  and  when  she  began  to  dispense  the 
fresh  dishes,  I  saw  at  once  that  the  day  of  my 
destiny  was  over.  You  would  have  thought  that 
she  owned  all  the  vegetables,  and  had  raised 
them  all  from  their  earliest  years.  Such  quiet, 
vegetable  airs  !  Such  gracious  appropriation  J 
At  length  I  said, — 

"  Polly,  do  you  know  who  planted  that  squash, 
or  those  squashes  ?  " 

"  James,  I  suppose." 

"  Well,  yes,  perhaps  James  did  plant  them,  to 
a  certain  extent.  But  who  hoed  them  ? " 

"  We  did." 

"  We  did  !  "  I  said  in  the  most  sarcastic  man' 
ner.  "And  I  suppose  we  put  on  the  sackcloth 
and  ashes,  when  the  striped  bug  came  at  four 
o'clock,  A.  M.,  and  we  watched  the  tender  leaves, 
and  watered  night  and  morning  the  feeble  plants 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     95 

I  tell  you,  Polly,"  said  I,  uncorking  the  Bor 
deaux  raspberry  vinegar,  "  there  is  not  a  pea 
here  that  does  not  represent  a  drop  of  moisture 
wrung  from  my  brow,  not  a  beet  that  does  not 
stand  for  a  back-ache,  not  a  squash  that  has  not 
caused  me  untold  anxiety  ;  and  I  did  hope  — 
but  I  will  say  no  more." 

Observation.  —  In  this  sort  of  family  discus 
sion,  "  I  will  say  no  more  "  is  the  most  effective 
thing  you  can  close  up  with. 

I  am  not  an  alarmist.  I  hope  I  am  as  cool  as 
anybody  this  hot  summer.  But  I  am  quite  ready 
to  say  to  Polly,  or  any  other  woman,  "  You  can 
have  the  ballot ;  only  leave  me  the  vegetables, 
or,  what  is  more  important,  the  consciousness  of 
power  in  vegetables."  I  see  how  it  is.  Woman 
is  now  supreme  in  the  house.  She  already 
stretches  out  her  hand  to  grasp  the  garden. 
She  will  gradually  control  everything.  Woman 
is  one  of  the  ablest  and  most  cunning  creatures 


96  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

who  have  ever  mingled  in  human  affairs.  I 
understand  those  women  who  say  they  don't 
want  the  ballot.  They  purpose  to  hold  the  real 
power  while  we  go  through  the  mockery  of  mak 
ing  laws.  They  want  the  power  without  the 
responsibility.  (Suppose  my  squash  had  not 
come  up,  or  my  beans  —  as  they  threatened  at 
one  time  —  had  gone  the  wrong  way  :  where 
would  I  have  been  ? )  We  are  to  be  held  to  all 
the  responsibilities.  Woman  takes  the  lead  in 
all  the  departments,  leaving  us  politics  only. 
And  what  is  politics  ?  Let  me  raise  the  vege 
tables  of  a  nation,  says  Polly,  and  I  care  not 
who  makes  its  politics.  Here  I  sat  at  the  table, 
armed  with  the  ballot,  but  really  powerless  among 
my  own  vegetables.  While  we  are  being  amused 
by  the  ballot,  woman  is  quietly  taking  things 
into  her  own  hands. 


ELEVENTH  WEEK. 


ERHAPS,  after  all,  it  is  not  what  you 
get  out  of  a  garden,  but  what  you  put 
into  it,  that  is  the  most  remunerative. 
What  is  a  man  ?  A  question  frequently  asked, 
and  never,  so  far  as  I  know,  satisfactorily  an 
swered.  He  commonly  spends  his  seventy 
years,  if  so  many  are  given  him,  in  getting 
ready  to  enjoy  himself.  How  many  hours,  how 
many  minutes,  does  one  get  of  that  pure  con 
tent  which  is  happiness  ?  I  do  not  mean  lazi 
ness,  which  is  always  discontent ;  but  that  se 
rene  enjoyment,  in  which  all  the  natural  senses 
have  easy  play,  and  the  unnatural  ones  have 
a  holiday.  There  is  probably  nothing  that  has 

S  G 


98  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

such  a  tranquillizing  effect,  and  leads  into  such 
content,  as  gardening.  By  gardening,  I  do  not 
mean  that  insane  desire  to  raise  vegetables 
which  some  have  ;  but  the  philosophical  occu 
pation  of  contact  with  the  earth,  and  compan 
ionship  with  gently  growing  things  and  patient 
processes  ;  that  exercise  which  soothes  the  spirit, 
and  develops  the  deltoid  muscles. 

In  half  an  hour  I  can  hoe  myself  right  away 
from  this  world,  as  we  commonly  see  it,  into  a 
large  place,  where  there  are  no  obstacles.  What 
an  occupation  it  is  for  thought !  The  mind 
broods  like  a  hen  on  eggs.  The  trouble  is,  that 
you  are  not  thinking  about  anything,  but  are 
really  vegetating  like  the  plants  around  you. 
I  begin  to  know  what  the  joy  of  the  grape-vine 
is  in  running  up  the  trellis,  which  is  similar  to 
that  of  the  squirrel  in  running  up  a  tree.  We 
all  have  something  in  our  nature  that  requires 
contact  with  the  earth.  In  the  solitude  of  gar- 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  99 

den-labor,  one  gets  into  a  sort  of  communion 
with  the  vegetable  life,  which  makes  the  old 
mythology  possible.  For  instance,  I  can  believe 
that  the  dryads  are  plenty  this  summer :  my 
garden  is  like  an  ash-heap.  Almost  all  the 
moisture  it  has  had  in  weeks  has  been  the  sweat 
of  honest  industry. 

The  pleasure  of  gardening  in  these  days,  when 
the  thermometer  is  at  ninety,  is  one  that  I  fear 
I  shall  not  be  able  to  make  intelligible  to  my 
readers,  many  of  whom  do  not  appreciate  the 
delight  of  soaking  in  the  sunshine.  I  suppose 
that  the  sun,  going  through  a  man,  as  it  will  on 
such  a  day,  takes  out  of  him  rheumatism,  con 
sumption,  and  every  other  disease,  except  sud 
den  death  —  from  sun-stroke.  But,  aside  from 
this,  there  is  an  odor  from  the  evergreens,  the 
hedges,  the  various  plants  and  vines,  that  is  only 
expressed  and  set  afloat  at  a  high  temperature, 
which  is  delicious  ;  and,  hot  as  it  may  be,  a  little 


IOO  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

breeze  will  come  at  intervals,  which  can  be  heard 
in  the  tree-tops,  and  which  is  an  unobtrusive 
benediction.  I  hear  a  quail  or  two  whistling  in 
the  ravine  ;  and  there  is  a  good  deal  of  fragmen 
tary  conversation  going  on  among  the  birds, 
even  on  the  warmest  days.  The  companionship 
of  Calvin,  also,  counts  for  a  good  deal.  He 
usually  attends  me,  unless  I  work  too  long  in 
one  place  ;  sitting  down  on  the  turf,  displaying 
the  ermine  of  his  breast,  and  watching  my  move 
ments  with  great  intelligence.  He  has  a  feline 
and  genuine  love  for  the  beauties  of  Nature,  and 
will  establish  himself  where  there  is  a  good  view, 
and  look  on  it  for  hours.  He  always  accompa 
nies  us  when  we  go  to  gather  the  vegetables, 
seeming  to  be  desirous  to  know  what  we  are  to 
have  for  dinner.  He  is  a  connoisseur  in  the 
garden  ;  being  fond  of  almost  all  the  vegetables, 
except  the  cucumber,  —  a  dietetic  hint  to  man. 
I  believe  it  is  also  said  that  the  pig  will  not  eat 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT 

tobacco.  These  are  important  facts.  It  is  sin 
gular,  however,  that  those  who  hold  up  the  pigs 
as  models  to  us  never  hold  us  up  as  models  to 
the  pigs. 

I  wish  I  knew  as  much  about  natural  history 
and  the  habits  of  animals  as  Calvin  does.  He 
is  the  closest  observer  I  ever  saw  ;  and  there  are 
few  species  of  animals  on  the  place  that  he  has 
not  analyzed.  I  think  that  he  has,  to  use  a 
euphemism  very  applicable  to  him,  got  outside 
of  every  one  of  them,  except  the  toad.  To  the 
toad  he  is  entirely  indifferent ;  but  I  presume 
he  knows  that  the  toad  is  the  most  useful  ani 
mal  in  the  garden.  I  think  the  Agricultural 
Society  ought  to  offer  a  prize  for  the  finest  toad. 
When  Polly  comes  to  sit  in  the  shade  near  my 
strawberry-beds,  to  shell  peas,  Calvin  is  always 
lying  near  in  apparent  obliviousness ;  but  not 
the  slightest  unusual  sound  can  be  made  in  the 
bushes,  that  he  is  not  alert,  and  prepared  to  in- 


1O2          •<  MY  ^SUMMER  IN  A  GARDEN. 

vestigate  the  cause  of  it.  It  is  this  habit  of 
observation,  so  cultivated,  which  has  given  him 
such  a  trained  mind,  and  made  him  so  philo 
sophical.  It  is  within  the  capacity  of  even  the 
humblest  of  us  to  attain  this. 

And,  speaking  of  the  philosophical  temper, 
there  is  no  class  of  men  whose  society  is  more 
to  be  desired  for  this  quality  than  that  of  plumb 
ers.  They  are  the  most  agreeable  men  I  know ; 
and  the  boys  in  the  business  begin  to  be  agreeable 
very  early.  I  suspect  the  secret  of  it  is,  that 
they  are  agreeable  by  the  hour.  In  the  driest 
days,  my  fountain  became  disabled :  the  pipe 
was  stopped  up.  A  couple  of  plumbers,  with 
the  implements  of  their  craft,  came  out  to  view 
the  situation.  There  was  a  good  deal  of  differ 
ence  of  opinion  about  where  the  stoppage  was. 
I  found  the  plumbers  perfectly  willing  to  sit 
down  and  talk  about  it,  —  talk  by  the  hour. 
Some  of  their  guesses  and  remarks  were  ex- 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.          1 03 

e?eedingly  ingenious ;  and  their  general  observa 
tions  on  other  subjects  were  excellent  in  their 
way,  and  could  hardly  have  been  better  if  they 
had  been  made  by  the  job.  The  work  dragged 
a  little,  —  as  it  is  apt  to  do  by  the  hour.  The 
plumbers  had  occasion  to  make  me  several  visits. 
Sometimes  they  would  find,  upon  arrival,  that 
they  had  forgotten  some  indispensable  tool ;  and 
one  would  go  back  to  the  shop,  a  mile  and  a 
half,  after  it ;  and  his  comrade  would  await  his 
return  with  the  most  exemplary  patience,  and 
sit  down  and  talk,  —  always  by  the  hour.  I  do 
not  know  but  it  is  a  habit  to  have  something 
wanted  at  the  shop.  They  seemed  to  me  very 
good  workmen,  and  always  willing  to  stop  and 
talk  about  the  job,  or  anything  else,  when  I  went 
near  them.  Nor  had  they  any  of  that  impetuous 
hurry  that  is  said  to  be  the  bane  of  our  Ameri 
can  civilization.  To  their  credit  be  it  said,  that 
I  never  observed  anything  of  it  in  them.  They 


104  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

can  afford  to  wait  Two  of  them  will  sometimes 
wait  nearly  half  a  day  while  a  comrade  goes 
for  a  tool.  They  are  patient  and  philosophi 
cal.  It  is  a  great  pleasure  to  meet  such  men. 
One  only  wishes  there  was  some  work  he  could 
do  for  them  by  the  hour.  There  ought  to  be 
reciprocity.  I  think  they  have  very  nearly 
solved  the  problem  of  Life:  it  is  to  work  for 
other  people,  never  for  yourself,  and  get  your 
pay  by  the  hour.  You  then  have  no  anxiety, 
and  little  work.  If  you  do  things  by  the  job, 
you  are  perpetually  driven :  the  hours  are 
scourges.  If  you  work  by  the  hour,  you  gently 
sail  on  the  stream  of  Time,  which  is  always 
bearing  you  on  to  the  haven  of  Pay,  whether 
you  make  any  effort,  or  not.  Working  by  the 
hour  tends  to  make  one  moral.  A  plumber 
working  by  the  job,  trying  to  unscrew  a  rusty, 
refractory  nut,  in  a  cramped  position,  where  the 
tongs  continually  slipped  off,  would  swear  ;  but 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING. 


105 


I  never  heard  one  of  them  swear,  or  exhibit  the 
least  impatience  at  such  a  vexation,  working  by 
the  hour.  Nothing  can  move  a  man  who  is  paid 
by  the  hour.  How  sweet  the  flight  of  time 
seems  to  his  calm  mind  1 


TWELFTH   WEEK. 

R.  HORACE  GREELEY,  the  in 
troduction  of  whose  name  confers 
an  honor  upon  this  page  (although 
I  ought  to  say  that  it  is  used  entirely  without 
his  consent),  is  my  sole  authority  in  agriculture. 
In  politics,  I  do  not  dare  to  follow  him  ;  but  in 
agriculture  he  is  irresistible.  When,  therefore,  I 
find  him  advising  Western  farmers  not  to  hill 
up  their  corn,  I  think  that  his  advice  must  be 
political.  You  must  hill  up  your  corn.  People 
always  have  hilled  up  their  corn.  It  would 
take  a  constitutional  amendment  to  change  the 
practice,  that  has  pertained  ever  since  maize  was 
raised.  "  It  will  stand  the  drought  better,"  says 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    IO7 

Mr.  Greeley,  "  if  the  ground  is  left  level."  I 
have  corn  in  my  garden,  ten  and  twelve  feet 
high,  strong  and  lusty,  standing  the  drought 
like  a  grenadier ;  and  it  is  hilled.  In  advising 
this  radical  change,  Mr.  Greeley  evidently  has 
a  political  purpose.  He  might  just  as  well  say 
that  you  should  not  hill  beans,  when  everybody 
knows  that  a  "  hill  of  beans  "  is  one  of  the  most 
expressive  symbols  of  disparagement.  When  I 
become  too  lazy  to  hill  my  corn,  I,  too,  shall  go 
into  politics. 

I  am  satisfied  that  it  is  useless  to  try  to  culti 
vate  "  pusley."  I  set  a  little  of  it  one  side,  and 
gave  it  some  extra  care.  It  did  not  thrive  as 
well  as  that  which  I  was  fighting.  The  fact  is, 
there  is  a  spirit  of  moral  perversity  in  the  plant, 
which  makes  it  grow  the  more,  the  more  it  is 
interfered  with.  I  am  satisfied  of  that.  I  doubt 
if  any  one  has  raised  more  "  pusley  "  this  year 
than  I  have  ;  and  my  warfare  with  it  has  been 


108  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

continual.  Neither  of  us  has  slept  much.  If 
you  combat  it,  it  will  grow,  to  use  an  expression 
that  will  be  understood  by  many,  like  the  devil. 
I  have  a  neighbor,  a  good  Christian  man,  be 
nevolent,  and  a  person  of  good  judgment.  He 
planted  next  to  me  an  acre  of  turnips  recently. 
A  few  days  after  he  went  to  look  at  his  crop  ; 
and  he  found  the  entire  ground  covered  with  a 
thick  and  luxurious  carpet  of  "  pusley,"  with  a  tur 
nip-top  worked  in  here  and  there  as  an  ornament. 
I  have  seldom  seen  so  thrifty  a  field.  I  advised 
my  neighbor  next  time  to  sow  "  pusley  "  ;  and 
then  he  might  get  a  few  turnips.  I  wish  there 
was  more  demand  in  our  city  markets  for  "  pus- 
ley"  as  a  salad.  I  can  recommend  it. 

It  does  not  take  a  great  man  to  soon  discover 
that,  in  raising  anything,  the  greater  part  of  the 
plants  goes  into  stalk  and  leaf,  and  the  fruit  is  a 
most  inconsiderable  portion.  I  plant  and  hoe  a 
hill  of  corn  :  it  grows  green  and  stout,  and  waves 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.          1 09 

its  broad  leaves  high  in  the  air,  and  is  months  in 
perfecting  itself,  and  then  yields  us  not  enough 
for  a  dinner.  It  grows  because  it  delights  to  do 
so,  —  to  take  the  juices  out  of  my  ground,  to 
absorb  my  fertilizers,  to  wax  luxuriant,  and  dis 
port  itself  in  the  summer  air,  and  with  very 
little  thought  of  making  any  return  to  me.  I 
might  go  all  through  my  garden  and  fruit-trees 
with  a  similar  result.  I  have  heard  of  places 
where  there  was  very  little  land  to  the  acre. 
It  is  universally  true  that  there  is  a  great  deal 
of  vegetable  show  and  fuss  for  the  result  pro 
duced.  I  do  not  complain  of  this.  One  cannot 
expect  vegetables  to  be  better  than  men  :  and 
they  make  a  great  deal  of  ostentatious  splurge ; 
and  many  of  them  come  to  no  result  at  last. 
Usually,  the  more  show  of  leaf  and  wood,  the 
less  fruit.  This  melancholy  reflection  is  thrown 
in  here  in  order  to  make  dog-days  seem  cheer' 
ful  in  comparison. 


IIO  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

One  of  the  minor  pleasures  of  life  is  that  of 
controlling  vegetable  activity  and  aggressions 
with  the  pruning-knife.  Vigorous  and  rapid 
growth  is,  however,  a  necessity  to  the  sport. 
To  prune  feeble  plants  and  shrubs  is  like  act 
ing  the  part  of  dry-nurse  to  a  sickly  orphan. 
You  must  feel  the  blood  of  Nature  bound  under 
your  hand,  and  get  the  thrill  of  its  life  in  your 
nerves.  To  control  and  culture  a  strong,  thrifty 
plant  in  this  way,  is  like  steering  a  ship  under 
full  headway,  or  driving  a  locomotive  with  your 
hand  on  the  lever,  or  pulling  the  reins  over  a  fast 
horse  when  his  blood  and  tail  are  up.  I  do  not 
understand,  by  the  way,  the  pleasure  of  the 
jockey  in  setting  up  the  tail  of  the  horse  arti 
ficially.  If  I  had  a  horse  with  a  tail  not  able 
to  sit  up,  I  should  feed  the  horse,  and  curry 
him  into  good  spirits,  and  let  him  set  up  his  own 
tail.  When  I  see  a  poor,  spiritless  horse  going 
by  with  an  artificially  set-up  tail,  it  is  only  a 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    ITI 

signal  of  distress.  I  desire  to  be  surrounded 
only  by  healthy,  vigorous  plants  and  trees,  which 
require  constant  cutting-in  and  management. 
Merely  to  cut  away  dead  branches  is  like  per 
petual  attendance  at  a  funeral,  and  puts  one  in 
low  spirits.  I  want  to  have  a  garden  and  or 
chard  rise  up  and  meet  me  every  morning,  with 
the  request  to  "lay  on,  Macduff."  I  respect  old 
age  ;  but  an  old  currant-bush,  hoary  with  mossy 
bark,  is  a  melancholy  spectacle. 

I  suppose  the  time  has  come  when  I  am  ex 
pected  to  say  something  about  fertilizers :  all 
agriculturists  do.  When  you  plant,  you  think 
you  cannot  fertilize  too  much  :  when  you  get  the 
bills  for  the  manure,  you  think  you  cannot  fer 
tilize  too  little.  Of  course  you  do  not  expect  to 
get  the  value  of  the  manure  back  in  fruits  and 
vegetables ;  but  something  is  due  to  science,  — 
to  chemistry  in  particular.  You  must  have  a 
knowledge  of  soils,  must  have  your  soil  analyzed, 


112  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

and  then  go  into  a  course  of  experiments  to  find 
what  it  needs.  It  needs  analyzing,  —  that,  I  am 
clear  about:  everything  needs  that.  You  had 
better  have  the  soil  analyzed  before  you  buy  :  if 
there  is  "  pusley  "  in  it,  let  it  alone.  See  if  it  is 
a  soil  that  requires  much  hoeing,  and  how  fine  it 
will  get  if  there  is  no  rain  for  two  months.  But 
when  you  come  to  fertilizing,  if  I  understand  the 
agricultural  authorities,  you  open  a  pit  that  will 
ultimately  swallow  you  up,  —  farm  and  all.  It 
is  the  great  subject  of  modern  times,  how  to 
fertilize  without  ruinous  expense  ;  how,  in  short, 
not  to  starve  the  earth  to  death  while  we  get  our 
living  out  of  it.  Practically,  the  business  is 
hardly  to  the  taste  of  a  person  of  a  poetic  turn 
of  mind.  The  details  of  fertilizing  are  not 
agreeable.  Michael  Angelo,  who  tried  every 
art,  and  nearly  every  trade,  never  gave  his  mind 
to  fertilizing.  It  is  much  pleasanter  and  easier 
to  fertilize  with  a  pen,  as  the  agricultural  writers 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  113 

do,  than  with  a  fork.  And  this  leads  me  to  say, 
that,  in  carrying  on  a  garden  yourself,  you  must 
have  a  "  consulting  "  gardener  ;  that  is,  a  man  to 
do  the  heavy  and  unpleasant  work.  To  such  a 
man,  I  say,  in  language  used  by  Demosthenes  to 
the  Athenians,  and  which  is  my  advice  to  all 
gardeners,  "  Fertilize,  fertilize,  fertilize  I " 


THIRTEENTH    WEEK. 

FIND  that  gardening  has  unsurpassed 
advantages  for  the  study  of  natural  his 
tory  ;  and  some  scientific  facts  have 
come  under  my  own  observation,  which  cannot 
fail  to  interest  naturalists  and  un-naturalists  in 
about  the  same  degree.  Much,  for  instance,  has 
been  written  about  the  toad,  an  animal  without 
which  no  garden  would  be  complete.  But  little 
account  has  been  made  of  his  value  :  the  beauty 
of  his  eye  alone  has  been  dwelt  on  ;  and  little 
has  been  said  of  his  mouth,  and  its  important 
function  as  a  fly  and  bug  trap.  His  habits,  and 
even  his  origin,  have  been  misunderstood.  Why, 
as  an  illustration,  are  toads  so  plenty  after  a 


The  toads  came,  out  of  their  holes"  —  Pa*?e  115. 


WHAT    I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING. 

thunder-shower  ?  All  my  life  long,  no  one  has 
been  able  to  answer  me  that  question.  Why, 
after  a  heavy  shower,  and  in  the  midst  of  it,  do 
such  multitudes  of  toads,  especially  little  ones, 
hop  about  on  the  gravel-walks  ?  For  many 
years,  I  believed  that  they  rained  down  ;  and  I 
suppose  many  people  think  so  still.  They  are 
so  small,  and  they  come  in  such  numbers  only 
in  the  shower,  that  the  supposition  is  not  a  vio 
lent  one.  "  Thick  as  toads  after  a  shower,"  is 
one  of  our  best  proverbs.  I  asked  an  explana 
tion  of  this  of  a  thoughtful  woman,  —  indeed,  a 
leader  in  the  great  movement  to  have  all  the 
toads  hop  in  any  direction,  without  any  distinc 
tion  of  sex  or  religion.  Her  reply  was,  that  the 
toads  come  out  during  the  shower  to  get  water. 
This,  however,  is  not  the  fact.  I  have  discovered 
that  they  come  out  not  to  get  water.  I  deluged 
a  dry  flower-bed,  the  other  night,  with  pailful 
after  pailful  of  water.  Instantly  the  toads  came 


Il6  MY    SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

out  of  their  holes  in  the  dirt,  by  tens  and  twen 
ties  and  fifties,  to  escape  death  by  drowning. 
The  big  ones  fled  away  in  a  ridiculous  streak  of 
hopping  ;  and  the  little  ones  sprang  about  in  the 
wildest  confusion.  The  toad  is  just  like  any 
other  land  animal :  when  his  house  is  full  of 
water,  he  quits  it.  These  facts,  with  the  draw 
ings  of  the  water  and  the  toads,  are  at  the  ser 
vice  of  the  distinguished  scientists  of  Albany  in 
New  York,  who  were  so  much  impressed  by  the 
Cardiff  Giant. 

The  domestic  cow  is  another  animal  whose 
ways  I  have  a  chance  to  study,  and  also  to  oblit 
erate  in  the  garden.  One  of  my  neighbors  has 
a  cow,  but  no  land  ;  and  he  seems  desirous  to 
pasture  her  on  the  surface  of  the  land  of  other 
people :  a  very  reasonable  desire.  The  man 
proposed  that  he  should  be  allowed  to  cut  the 
grass  from  my  grounds  for  his  cow.  I  knew  the 
cow,  having  often  had  her  in  my  garden  ;  knew 


WHAT    I    KNOW    ABOUT   GARDENING. 

her  gait  and  the  size  of  her  feet,  which  struck 
me  as  a  little  large  for  the  size  of  the  body.  Hav 
ing  no  cow  myself,  but  acquaintance  with  my 
neighbor's,  I  told  him  that  I  thought  it  would 
be  fair  for  him  to  have  the  grass.  He  was, 
therefore,  to  keep  the  grass  nicely  cut,  and  to 
keep  his  cow  at  home.  I  waited  some  time  after 
the  grass  needed  cutting  ;  and,  as  my  neighbor 
did  not  appear,  I  hired  it  cut.  No  sooner  was  it 
done  than  he  promptly  appeared,  and  raked  up 
most  of  it,  and  carried  it  away.  He  had  evi 
dently  been  waiting  that  opportunity.  When 
the  grass  grew  again,  the  neighbor  did  not  ap 
pear  with  his  scythe  ;  but  one  morning  I  found 
the  cow  tethered  on  the  sward,  hitched  near  the 
clothes-horse,  a  short  distance  from  the  house. 
This  seemed  to  be  the  man's  idea  of  the  best 
way  to  cut  the  grass.  I  disliked  to  have  the  cow 
there,  because  I  knew  her  inclination  to  pull  up 
the  stake,  and  transfer  her  field  of  mowing  to 


Il8  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDJEN. 

the  garden,  but  especially  because  of  her  voice. 
She  has  the  most  melancholy  "  moo "  I  ever 
heard.  It  is  like  the  wail  of  one  un-infallible, 
excommunicated,  and  lost.  It  is  a  most  distress 
ing  perpetual  reminder  of  the  brevity  of  life  and 
the  shortness  of  feed.  It  is  unpleasant  to  the 
family.  We  sometimes  hear  it  in  the  middle  of 
the  night,  breaking  the  silence  like  a  suggestion 
of  coming  calamity.  It  is. as  bad  as  the  howling 
of  a  dog  at  a  funeral. 

I  told  the  man  about  it ;  but  he  seemed  to 
think  that  he  was  not  responsible  for  the  cow's 
voice.  I  then  told  him  to  take  her  away  ;  and 
he  did,  at  intervals,  shifting  her  to  different  parts 
of  the  grounds  in  my  absence,  so  that  the  deso 
late  voice  would  startle  us  from  unexpected  quar 
ters.  If  I  were  to  unhitch  the  cow,  and  turn  her 
loose,  I  knew  where  she  would  go.  If  I  were  to 
lead  her  away,  the  question  was,  Where  ?  for 
I  did  not  fancy  leading  a  cow  about  till  I  could 


"  1  told  the  man  that  1  could  not  have  the  cow  in  the  grounds." 
Page  119. 


WHAT   I    KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING. 

find  somebody  who  was  willing  to  pasture  her. 
To  this  dilemma  had  my  excellent  neighbor 
reduced  me.  But  I  found  him,  one  Sunday 
morning,  —  a  day  when  it  would  not  do  to  get 
angry,  —  tying  his  cow  at  the  foot  of  the  hill ; 
the  beast  all  the  time  going  on  in  that  abomi 
nable  voice.  I  told  the  man  that  I  could  not 
have  the  cow  in  the  grounds.  He  said,  "  All 
right,  boss  "  ;  but  he  did  not  go  away.  I  asked 
him  to  clear  out.  The  man,  who  is  a  French 
sympathizer  from  the  Republic  of  Ireland,  kept 
his  temper  perfectly.  He  said  he  was  n't  doing 
anything,  just  feeding  his  cow  a  bit :  he  would 
n't  make  me  the  least  trouble  in  the  world.  I 
reminded  him  that  he  had  been  told  again  and 
again  not  to  come  here  ;  that  he  might  have  all 
the  grass,  but  he  should  not  bring  his  cow  upon 
the  premises.  The  imperturbable  man  assented 
to  everything  that  I  said,  and  kept  on  feeding  his 
cow.  Before  I  got  him  to  go  to  fresh  scenes  and 


I2O  MY    SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

pastures  new,  the  Sabbath  was  almost  broken : 
but  it  was  saved  by  one  thing  ;  it  is  difficult  to 
be  emphatic  when  no  one  is  emphatic  on  the 
other  side.  The  man  and  his  cow  have  taught 
me  a  great  lesson,  which  I  shall  recall  when  I 
keep  a  cow.  I  can  recommend  this  cow,  if  any 
body  wants  one,  as  a  steady  boarder,  whose 
keeping  will  cost  the  owner  little  ;  but,  if  her 
milk  is  at  all  like  her  voice,  those  who  drink  it 
are  on  the  straight  road  to  lunacy. 

I  think  I  have  said  that  we  have  a  game-pre 
serve.  We  keep  quails,  or  try  to,  in  the  thickly 
wooded,  bushed,  and  brushed  ravine.  This  bird 
is  a  great  favorite  with  us,  dead  or  alive,  on  ac 
count  of  its  tasteful  plumage,  its  tender  flesh,  its 
domestic  virtues,  and  its  pleasant  piping.  Be 
sides,  although  I  appreciate  toads  and  cows,  and 
all  that  sort  of  thing,  I  like  to  have  a  game-pre 
serve  more  in  the  English  style.  And  we  did. 
For  in  July,  while  the  game-law  was  on,  and  the 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  12  i 

young  quails  were  coming  on,  we  were  awakened 
one  morning  by  firing,  —  musketry-firing,  close 
at  hand.  My  first  thought  was,  that  war  was 
declared  ;  but,  as  I  should  never  pay  much  at 
tention  to  war  declared  at  that  time  in  the  morn 
ing,  I  went  to  sleep  again.  But  the  occurrence 
was  repeated,  —  and  not  only  early  in  the  morn 
ing,  but  at  night.  There  was  calling  of  dogs, 
breaking  down  of  brush,  and  firing  of  guns.  It 
is  hardly  pleasant  to  have  guns  fired  in  the  di 
rection  of  the  house,  at  your  own  quails.  The 
hunters  could  be  sometimes  seen,  but  never  caught. 
Their  best  time  was  about  sunrise ;  but,  before  one 
could  dress  and  get  to  the  front,  they  would  retire. 
One  morning,  about  four  o'clock,  I  heard  the 
battle  renewed.  I  sprang  up,  but  not  in  arms, 
and  went  to  a  window.  Polly  (like  another 
"  blessed  damozel ")  flew  to  another  window,  — 

"  The  blessed  damozel  leaned  out 
From  the  gold  bar  of  heaven,"  — 
6 


122  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

and  reconnoitred  from  behind  the  blinds. 

"  The  wonder  was  not  yet  quite  gone 
From  that  still  look  of  hers," 

when  an  armed  man  and  a  legged  dog  appeared 
in  the  opening.     I  was  vigilantly  watching  him. 

"  And  now 
She  spoke  through  the  still  weather." 

"  Are  you   afraid   to  speak   to  him  ? "   asked 
Polly.     Not  exactly, 

"  she  spoke  as  when 
The  stars  sang  in  their  spheres." 

Stung   by   this   inquiry,  I  leaned  out  of  the 
window  till 

"The  bar  /leaned  on  (was)  warm," 

and  cried, — 

"  Halloo,  there  !     What  are  you  doing  ? " 

"  Look   out   he   don't   shoot  you,"  called  out 

Polly  from  the  other  window,  suddenly  going  on 

another  tack. 

I   explained   that  a  sportsman   would  not  be 


"  Looking for  a  lost  hen"  —  Page  123. 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.          123 

likely  to  shoot  a  gentleman  in  his  own  house, 
with  bird-shot,  so  long  as  quails  were  to  be  had. 

"  You  have  no  business  here :  what  are  you 
after  ? "  I  repeated. 

"Looking  for  a  lost  hen,"  said  the  man  as  he 
strode  away. 

The  reply  was  so  satisfactory  and  conclusive 
that  I  shut  the  blinds  and  went  to  bed. 

But  one  evening  I  overhauled  one  of  the 
poachers.  Hearing  his  dog  in  the  thicket,  I 
rushed  through  the  brush,  and  came  in  sight 
of  the  hunter  as  he  was  retreating  down  the 
road.  He  came  to  a  halt ;  and  we  had  some 
conversation  in  a  high  key.  Of  course  I  threat 
ened  to  prosecute  him.  I  believe  that  is  the 
thing  to  do  in  such  cases  ;  but  how  I  was  to  do 
it,  when  I  did  not  know  his  name  or  ancestry, 
and  could  n't  see  his  face,  never  occurred  to  me. 
(I  remember,  now,  that  a  farmer  once  proposed 
to  prosecute  me  when  I  was  fishing  in  a  trout- 


124  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

brook  on  his  farm,  and  asked  my  name  for  that 
purpose.)  He  said  he  should  smile  to  see  me 
prosecute  him. 

"  You  can't  do  it :  there  ain't  no  notice  up 
about  trespassing."  This  view  of  the  common 
law  impressed  me  ;  and  I  said,  — 

"  But  these  are  private  grounds." 

"  Private  h —  !  "  was  all  his  response. 

You  can't  argue  much  with  a  man  who  has  a 
gun  in  his  hands,  when  you  have  none.  Besides, 
it  might  be  a  needle-gun,  for  aught  I  knew.  I 
gave  it  up,  and  we  separated. 

There  is  this  disadvantage  about  having  a 
game-preserve  attached  to  your  garden :  it 
makes  life  too  lively. 


FOURTEENTH  WEEK. 


N  these  golden  latter  August  days,  Na 
ture  has  come  to  a  serene  equilibrium. 
Having  flowered  and  fruited,  she  is  en 
joying  herself.  I  can  see  how  things  are  going: 
it  is  a  down-hill  business  after  this  ;  but,  for  the 
time  being,  it  is  like  swinging  in  a  hammock,  — 
such  a  delicious  air,  such  a  graceful  repose  !  I 
take  off  my  hat  as  I  stroll  into  the  garden  and 
look  about ;  and  it  does  seem  as  if  Nature  had 
sounded  a  truce.  I  did  n't  ask  for  it.  I  went 
out  with  a  hoe ;  but  the  serene  sweetness  dis 
arms  me  Thrice  is  he  armed  who  has  a  long- 
handled  hoe,  with  a  double  blade.  Yet  to-day 
I  am  almost  ashamed  to  appear  in  such  a  bel- 


126  MY   SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

ligerent  fashion,  with  this  terrible  mitrailleuse 
of  gardening. 

The  tomatoes  are  getting  tired  of  ripening, 
and  are  beginning  to  go  into  a  worthless  con 
dition, —  green.  The  cucumbers  cumber  the 
ground, — great  yellow,  over-ripe  objects,  no 
more  to  be  compared  to  the  crisp  beauty  of 
their  youth  than  is  the  fat  swine  of  the  sty 
to  the  clean  little  pig.  The  nutmeg-melons, 
having  covered  themselves  with  delicate  lace- 
work,  are  now  ready  to  leave  the  vine.  I  know 
they  are  ripe  if  they  come  easily  off  the 
stem. 

Moral  Observations.  —  You  can  tell  when  peo 
ple  are  ripe  by  their  willingness  to  let  go.  Rich 
ness  and  ripeness  are  not  exactly  the  same. 
The  rich  are  apt  to  hang  to  the  stem  with 
tenacity.  I  have  nothing  against  the  rich.  If 
I  were  not  virtuous,  I  should  like  to  be  rich. 
But  we  cannot  have  everything,  as  the  man  said 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     127 

when  he  was  down  with  small-pox  and  cholera, 
and  the  yellow-fever  came  into  the  neighbor 
hood. 

Now,  the  grapes,  soaked  in  this  liquid  gold, 
called  air,  begin  to  turn,  mindful  of  the  injunc 
tion,  "  to  turn  or  burn."  The  clusters  under  the 
leaves  are  getting  quite  purple,  but  look  better 
than  they  taste.  I  think  there  is  no  danger 
but  they  will  be  gathered  as  soon  as  they  are 
ripe  One  of  the  blessings  of  having  an  open 
garden  is,  that  I  do  not  have  to  watch  my  fruit : 
a  dozen  youngsters  do  that,  and  let  it  waste  no 
time  after  it  matures.  I  wish  it  were  possible  to 
grow  a  variety  of  grape  like  the  explosive  bul 
lets,  that  should  explode  in  the  stomach:  the 
vine  would  make  such  a  nice  border  for  the  gar 
den,  —  a  masked  battery  of  grape.  The  pears, 
too,  are  getting  russet  and  heavy ;  and  here  and 
there  amid  the  shining  leaves  one  gleams  as 
ruddy  as  the  cheek  of  the  Nutbrown  Maid. 


128  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

The  Flemish  Beauties  come  off  readily  from  the 
stem,  if  I  take  them  in  my  hand  :  they  say  all 
kinds  of  beauty  come  off  by  handling. 

The  garden  is  peace  as  much  as  if  it  were  an 
empire.  Even  the  man's  cow  lies  down  under 
the  tree  where  the  man  has  tied  her,  with  such 
an  air  of  contentment,  that  I  have  small  desire 
to  disturb  her.  She  is  chewing  my  cud  as  if  it 
were  hers.  Well,  eat  on  and  chew  on,  melan 
choly  brute.  I  have  not  the  heart  to  tell  the 
man  to  take  you  away  :  and  it  would  do  no  good 
if  I  had  ;  he  would  n't  do  it.  The  man  has  not 
a  taking  way.  Munch  on,  ruminant  creature. 
The  frost  will  soon  come ;  the  grass  will  be 
brown.  I  will  be  charitable  while  this  blessed 
lull  continues  :  for  our  benevolences  must  soon 
be  turned  to  other  and  more  distant  objects,  — 
the  amelioration  of  the  condition  of  the  Jews, 
the  education  of  theological  young  men  in  tha 
West,  and  the  like. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     12$ 

I  do  not  know  that  these  appearances  are  de 
ceitful  ;  but  I  sufficiently  know  that  this  is  a 
wicked  world,  to  be  glad  that  I  have  taken  it  on 
shares.  In  fact,  I  could  not  pick  the  pears 
alone,  not  to  speak  of  eating  them.  When  I 
climb  the  trees,  and  throw  down  the  dusky 
fruit,  Polly  catches  it  in  her  apron  ;  nearly  al 
ways,  however,  letting  go  when  it  drops,  the  fall 
is  so  sudden.  The  sun  gets  in  her  face  ;  and, 
every  time  a  pear  comes  down,  it  is  a  surprise, 
like  having  a  tooth  out,  she  says. 

"If  I  could  n't  hold  an  apron  better  than 
that !  "  —  But  the  sentence  is  not  finished  : 
it  is  useless  to  finish  that  sort  of  a  sentence  in 
this  delicious  weather.  Besides,  conversation  is 
dangerous.  As,  for  instance,  towards  evening  I 
am  preparing  a  bed  for  a  sowing  of  turnips,  — 
not  that  I  like  turnips  in  the  least ;  but  this  is 
the  season  to  sow  them.  Polly  comes  out,  and 
extemporizes  her  usual  seat  to  "consult  me" 
6*  i 


I£O  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

about  matters  while  I  work.     I  well  know  that 
something  is  coming. 

"  This  is  a  rotation  of  crops,  is  n't  it  ? " 

"  Yes  :  I  have  rotated  the  gone-to-seed  lettuce 
off,  and  expect  to  rotate  the  turnips  in  ;  it  is  a 
political  fashion." 

"  Is  n't  it  a  shame  that  the  tomatoes  are  all. 
getting  ripe  at  once  ?     What  a  lot  of  squashes  ! 
I  wish  we  had  an  oyster-bed.     Do  you  want  me 
to  help  you  any  more  than  I  am  helping  ? " 

"  No,  I  thank  you."  (I  wonder  what  all  this 
is  about  ?) 

"  Don't  you  think  we  could  sell  some  straw 
berries  next  year  ? " 

"By  all  means,  sell  anything.  We  shall  no 
doubt  get  rich  out  of  this  acre." 

"Don't  be  foolish." 

And  now ! 

"Don't  you  think  it  would  be  nice  to  have 
a?"—  And  Polly  unfolds  a  small  scheme  of 


"  Polly  unfolds  a  small  scheme  of  benevolence"  —  Page  130. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    13! 

benevolence,  which  is  not  quite  enough  to  break 
me,  and  is  really  to  be  executed  in  an  economical 
manner.  "  Would  n't  that  be  nice  ?  " 

"  O  yes  !  And  where  is  the  money  to  come 
from?" 

"  I  thought  we  had  agreed  to  sell  the  straw 
berries." 

"  Certainly.  But  I  think  we  would  make 
more  money  if  we  sold  the  plants  now." 

"  Well,"  said  Polly,  concluding  the  whole  mat 
ter,  "  I  am  going  to  do  it."  And,  having  thus 
"  consulted  "  me,  Polly  goes  away  ;  and  I  put  in 
the  turnip-seeds  quite  thick,  determined  to  raise 
enough  to  sell.  But  not  even  this  mercenary 
thought  can  ruffle  my  mind  as  I  rake  off  the 
loamy  bed.  I  notice,  however,  that  the  spring 
smell  has  gone  out  of  the  dirt.  That  went  into 
the  first  crop. 

In  this  peaceful  unison  with  yielding  nature,  I 
was  a  little  taken  aback  to  find  that  a  new  enemy 


132  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

had  turned  up.  The  celery  had  just  rubbeft 
through  the  fiery  scorching  of  the  drought,  and 
stood  a  faint  chance  to  grow ;  when  I  noticed  on 
the  green  leaves  a  big  green-and-black  worm, 
called,  I  believe,  the  celery-worm  :  but  I  don't 
know  who  called  him  ;  I  am  sure  I  did  not.  It 
was  almost  ludicrous  that  he  should  turn  up 
here,  just  at  the  end  of  the  season,  when  I  sup 
posed  that  my  war  with  the  living  animals  was 
over.  Yet  he  was,  no  doubt,  predestinated  ;  for 
he  went  to  work  as  cheerfully  as  if  he  had  arrived 
in  June,  when  everything  was  fresh  and  vigorous. 
It  beats  me —  Nature  does.  I  doubt  not,  that, 
if  I  were  to  leave  my  garden  now  for  a  week,  it 
would  n't  know  me  on  my  return.  The  patch  I 
scratched  over  for  the  turnips,  and  left  as  clean 
as  earth,  is  already  full  of  ambitious  "  pusley," 
which  grows  with  all  the  confidence  of  youth 
and  the  skill  of  old  age.  It  beats  the  serpent 
as  an  emblem  of  immortality.  While  all  the 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING. 


133 


others  of  us  in  the  garden  rest  and  sit  in  com 
fort  a  moment,  upon  the  summit  of  the  summer, 
it  is  as  rampant  and  vicious  as  ever.  It  accepts 
no  armistice. 


FIFTEENTH    WEEK. 


T  is  said  that  absence  conquers  all  things, 
love  included ;  but  it  has  a  contrary 
effect  on  a  garden.  I  was  absent  for 
two  or  three  weeks.  I  left  my  garden  a  para 
dise,  as  paradises  go  in  this  protoplastic  world  ; 
and  when  I  returned  the  trail  of  the  serpent 
was  over  it  all,  so  to  speak.  (This  is  in  addition 
to  the  actual  snakes  in  it,  which  are  large  enough 
to  strangle  children  of  average  size.)  I  asked 
Polly  if  she  had  seen  to  the  garden  while  I  was 
away,  and  she  said  she  had.  I  found  that  all 
the  melons  had  been  seen  to,  and  the  early 
grapes  and  pears.  The  green  worm  had  also 
seen  to  about  half  the  celery  ;  and  a  large  flock 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.  135 

of  apparently  perfectly  domesticated  chickens 
were  roaming  over  the  ground,  gossiping  in  the 
hot  September  sun,  and  picking  up  any  odd  trifle 
that  might  be  left.  On  the  whole,  the  garden 
could  not  have  been  better  seen  to  ;  though  it 
would  take  a  sharp  eye  to  see  the  potato-vines 
amid  the  rampant  grass  and  weeds. 

The  new  strawberry-plants,  for  one  thing,  had 
taken  advantage  of  my  absence.  Every  one  of 
them  had  sent  out  as  many  scarlet  runners  as  an 
Indian  tribe  has.  Some  of  them  had  blos 
somed  ;  and  a  few  had  gone  so  far  as  to  bear 
ripe  berries,  —  long,  pear-shaped  fruit,  hanging 
like  the  ear-pendants  of  an  East-Indian  bride. 
I  could  not  but  admire  the  persistence  of  these 
zealous  plants,  which  seemed  determined  to  prop 
agate  themselves  both  by  seeds  and  roots,  and 
make  sure  of  immortality  in  some  way.  Even 
the  Colfax  variety  was  as  ambitious  as  the 
others.  After  having  seen  the  declining  letter 


136  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

of  Mr,  Colfax,  I  did  not  suppose  that  this  vine 
would  run  any  more,  and  intended  to  root  it 
out.  But  one  can  never  say  what  these  politi 
cians  mean  ;  and  I  shall  let  this  variety  grow 
until  after  the  next  election,  at  least ;  although 
I  hear  that  the  fruit  is  small,  and  rather  sour. 
If  there  is  any  variety  of  strawberries  that  really 
declines  to  run,  and  devotes  itself  to  a  private 
life  of  fruit-bearing,  I  should  like  to  get  it.  I 
may  mention  here,  since  we  are  on  politics,  that 
the  Doolittle  raspberries  had  sprawled  all  over 
the  strawberry-beds  :  so  true  is  it  that  politics 
makes  strange  bedfellows. 

But  another  enemy  had  come  into  the  straw 
berries,  which,  after  all  that  has  been  said  in 
these  papers,  I  am  almost  ashamed  to  mention. 
But  does  the  preacher  in  the  pulpit,  Sunday 
after  Sunday,  year  after  year,  shrink  from  speak 
ing  of  sin  ?  I  refer,  of  course,  to  the  greatest 
enemy  of  mankind,  "  p-sl-y."  The  ground  was 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    137 

carpeted  with  it.  I  should  think  that  this  was 
the  tenth  crop  of  the  season  ;  and  it  was  as  good 
as  the  first.  I  see  no  reason  why  our  northern 
soil  is  not  as  prolific  as  that  of  the  tropics,  and 
will  not  produce  as  many  crops  in  the  year. 
The  mistake  we  make  is  in  trying  to  force  things 
that  are  not  natural  to  it.  I  have  no  doubt  that, 
if  we  turn  our  attention  to  "pusley,"  we  can 
beat  the  world. 

I  had  no  idea,  until  recently,  how  generally 
this  simple  and  thrifty  plant  is  feared  and  hated. 
Far  beyond  what  I  had  regarded  as  the  bounds 
of  civilization,  it  is  held  as  one  of  the  mysteries 
of  a  fallen  world  ;  accompanying  the  home  mis 
sionary  on  his  wanderings,  and  preceding  the 
footsteps  of  the  Tract  Society.  I  was  not  long 
ago  in  the  Adirondacks.  We  had  built  a  camp 
for  the  night,  in  the  heart  of  the  woods,  high  up 
on  John's  Brook  and  near  the  foot  of  Mount 
Marcy :  I  can  see  the  lovely  spot  now.  It  was 


I3S1  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

on  the  bank  of  the  crystal,  rocky  stream,  at  the 
foot  of  high  and  slender  falls,  which  poured  into 
a  broad  amber  basin.  Out  of  this  basin  we  had 
just  taken  trout  enough  for  our  supper,  which 
had  been  killed,  and  roasted  over  the  fire  on 
sharp  sticks,  and  eaten  before  they  had  an  op 
portunity  to  feel  the  chill  of  this  deceitful  world. 
We  were  lying  under  the  hut  of  spruce-bark,  on 
fragrant  hemlock-boughs,  talking,  after  supper. 
In  front  of  us  was  a  huge  fire  of  birch-logs ; 
and  over  it  we  could  see  the  top  of  the  falls 
glistening  in  the  moonlight ;  and  the  roar  of  the 
falls,  and  the  brawling  of  the  stream  near  us, 
filled  all  the  ancient  woods.  It  was  a  scene 
upon  which  one  would  think  no  thought  of  sin 
could  enter.  We  were  talking  with  old  Phelpsv 
the  guide.  Old  Phelps  is  at  once  guide,  phi 
losopher,  and  friend.  He  knows  the  woods  and 
streams  and  mountains,  and  their  savage  inhabi 
tants,  as  well  as  we  know  all  our  rich  relation sf 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     139 

and  what  they  are  doing  ;  and  in  lonely  bear- 
hunts  and  sable-trappings  he  has  thought  out 
and  solved  most  of  the  problems  of  life.  As  he 
stands  in  his  wood-gear,  he  is  as  grizzly  as  an  old 
cedar-tree ;  and  he  speaks  in  a  high  falsetto 
voice,  which  would  be  invaluable  to  a  boatswain 
in  a  storm  at  sea. 

We  had  been  talking  of  all  subjects  about 
which  rational  men  are  interested,  —  bears, 
panthers,  trapping,  the  habits  of  trout,  the 
tariff,  the  internal  revenue  (to  wit,  the  injustice 
of  laying  such  a  tax  on  tobacco,  and  none  on 
dogs :  "  There  ain't  no  dog  in  the  ZThited  States," 
says  the  guide,  at  the  top  of  his  voice,  "  that 
earns  his  living"),  the  Adventists,  the  Corner 
Grat,  Horace  Greeley,  religion,  the  propagation 
of  seeds  in  the  wilderness  (as,  for  instance,  where 
were  the  seeds  lying  for  ages  that  spring  up  into 
certain  plants  and  flowers  as  soon  as  a  spot  is 
cleared  anywhere  in  the  most  remote  forest ; 


I4O  MY   SUMMER   IN    A   GARDEN. 

and  why  does  a  growth  of  oak-trees  always 
come  up  after  a  growth  of  pine  has  been  re 
moved  ?)  —  in  short,  we  had  pretty  nearly 
reached  a  solution  of  many  mysteries,  when 
Phelps  suddenly  exclaimed  with  uncommon 
energy,  — 

"  Wall,  there  's  one  thing  that  beats  me  ! " 

"  What 's  that  ?  "  we  asked  with  undisguised 
curiosity. 

"  That 's  '  pusley  ' !  "  he  replied,  in  the  tone  of 
a  man  who  has  come  to  one  door  in  life  which  is 
hopelessly  shut,  and  from  which  he  retires  in 
despair. 

"  Where  it  comes  from  I  don't  know,  nor  what 
to  do  with  it.  It 's  in  my  garden  ;  and  I  can't 
get  rid  of  it.  It  beats  me." 

About  "  pusley  "  the  guide  had  no  theory  and 
no  hope.  A  feeling  of  awe  came  over  me,  as  we 
lay  there  at  midnight,  hushed  by  the  sound  of 
the  stream  and  the  rising  wind  in  the  spruce- 


WHAT    I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  14! 

tops.  Then  man  can  go  nowhere  that  "pusley" 
will  not  attend  him.  Though  he  camp  on  the 
Upper  Au  Sable,  or  penetrate  the  forest  where 
rolls  the  Allegash,  and  hears  no  sound  save  his 
own  allegations,  he  will  not  escape  it.  It  has 
entered  the  happy  valley  of  Keene,  although 
there  is  yet  no  church  there,  and  only  a  feeble 
school  part  of  the  year.  Sin  travels  faster  than 
they  that  ride  in  chariots.  I  take  my  hoe,  and 
begin  ;  but  I  feel  that  I  am  warring  against 
something  whose  roots  take  hold  on  H. 

By  the  time  a  man  gets  to  be  eighty  he  learns 
that  he  is  compassed  by  limitations,  and  that 
there  has  been  a  natural  boundary  set  to  his 
individual  powers.  As  he  goes  on  in  life,  he 
begins  to  doubt  his  ability  to  destroy  all  evil 
and  to  reform  all  abuses,  and  to  suspect  that 
there  will  be  much  left  to  do  after  he  has  done. 
I  stepped  into  my  garden  in  the  spring,  not 
doubting  that  I  should  be  easily  master  of  the 


142  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

weeds.  I  have  simply  learned  that  an  institution 
which  is  at  least  six  thousand  years  old,  and  I 
believe  six  millions,  is  not  to  be  put  down  in 
one  season. 

I  have  been  digging  my  potatoes,  if  anybody 
cares  to  know  it.  I  planted  them  in  what  are 
called  "  Early  Rose,"  —  the  rows  a  little  less 
than  three  feet  apart ;  but  the  vines  came  to 
an  early  close  in  the  drought.  Digging  pota 
toes  is  a  pleasant,  soothing  occupation,  but  not 
poetical.  It  is  good  for  the  mind,  unless  they 
are  too  small  (as  many  of  mine  are),  when  it 
begets  a  want  of  gratitude  to  the  bountiful 
earth.  What  small  potatoes  we  all  are,  com 
pared  with  what  we  might  be !  We  don't 
plough  deep  enough,  any  of  us,  for  one  thing. 
I  shall  put  in  the  plough  next  year,  and  give 
the  tubers  room  enough.  I  think  they  felt  the 
lack  of  it  this  year:  many  of  them  seemed 
ashamed  to  come  out  so  small.  There  is  great 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING. 


143 


pleasure  in  turning  out  the  brown-jacketed  fel 
lows  into  the  sunshine  of  a  royal  September 
day,  and  seeing  them  glisten  as  they  lie  thickly 
strewn  on  the  warm  soil.  Life  has  few  such 
moments.  But  then  they  must  be  picked  up. 
The  picking-up,  in  this  world,  is  always  the  m> 
pleasant  part  of  it. 


SIXTEENTH    WEEK. 

DO  not  hold  myself  bound  to  answer 
the  question,  Does  gardening  pay  ?  It 
is  so  difficult  to  define  what  is  meant 
by  paying.  There  is  a  popular  notion  that, 
unless  a  thing  pays,  you  had  better  let  it  alone  ; 
and  I  may  say  that  there  is  a  public  opinion  that 
will  not  let  a  man  or  woman  continue  in  the 
indulgence  of  a  fancy  that  does  not  pay.  And 
public  opinion  is  stronger  than  the  legislature, 
and  nearly  as  strong  as  the  ten  commandments : 
I  therefore  yield  to  popular  clamor  when  I  dis 
cuss  the  profit  of  my  garden. 

As  I  look  at  it,  you  might  as  well  ask,  Does  a 
sunset  pay  ?     I  know  that  a  sunset  is  commonly 


WHAT    I    KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  1 45 

looked  on  as  a  cheap  entertainment ;  but  it  is 
really  one  of  the  most  expensive.  It  is  true 
that  we  can  all  have  front  seats,  and  we  do  not 
exactly  need  to  dress  for  it  as  we  do  for  the 
opera  ;  but  the  conditions  under  which  it  is  to 
be  enjoyed  are  rather  dear.  Among  them  I 
should  name  a  good  suit  of  clothes,  including 
some  trifling  ornament,  —  not  including  back 
hair  for  one  sex,  or  the  parting  of  it  in  the 
middle  for  the  other.  I  should  add  also  a  good 
dinner,  well  cooked  and  digestible  ;  and  the  cost 
of  a  fair  education,  extended,  perhaps,  through 
generations  in  which  sensibility  and  love  of 
beauty  grew.  What  I  mean  is,  that  if  a  man 
is  hungry  and  naked,  and  half  a  savage,  or  with 
the  love  of  beauty  undeveloped  in  him,  a  sunset 
is  thrown  away  on  him :  so  that  it  appears  that 
the  conditions  of  the  enjoyment  of  a  sunset  are 
as  costly  as  anything  in  our  civilization. 

Of  course  there  is  no  such  thing  as  absolute 
7  J 


146  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

value  in  this  world.  You  can  only  estimate 
what  a  thing  is  worth  to  you.  Does  gardening 
in  a  city  pay  ?  You  might  as  well  ask  if  it  pays 
to  keep  hens,  or  a  trotting-horse,  or  to  wear  a 
gold  ring,  or  to  keep  your  lawn  cut,  or  your  hair 
cut.  It  is  as  you  like  it.  In  a  certain  sense,  it 
is  a  sort  of  profanation  to  consider  if  my  garden 
pays,  or  to  set  a  money-value  upon  my  delight  in 
it.  I  fear  that  you  could  not  put  it  in  money. 
Job  had  the  right  idea  in  his  mind  when  he 
asked,  "  Is  there  any  taste  in  the  white  of  an 
egg  ?  "  Suppose  there  is  not !  What !  shall  I 
set  a  price  upon  the  tender  asparagus  or  the 
crisp  lettuce,  which  made  the  sweet  spring  a 
reality  ?  Shall  I  turn  into  merchandise  the  red 
strawberry,  the  pale  green  pea,  the  high-flavored 
raspberry,  the  sanguinary  beet,  that  love-plant 
the  tomato,  and  the  corn  which  did  not  waste  its 
sweetness  on  the  desert  air,  but,  after  flowing  in 
a  sweet  rill  through  all  our  summer  life,  mingled 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     147 

at  last  with  the  engaging  bean  in  a  pool  of  suc 
cotash  ?  Shall  I  compute  in  figures  what  daily 
freshness  and  health  and  delight  the  garden 
yields,  let  alone  the  large  crop  of  anticipation 
I  gathered  as  soon  as  the  first  seeds  got  above 
ground  ?  I  appeal  to  any  gardening  man  of 
sound  mind,  if  that  which  pays  him  best  in 
gardening  is  not  that  which  he  cannot  show  in 
his  trial-balance.  Yet  I  yield  to  public  opinion, 
when  I  proceed  to  make  such  a  balance  ;  and  I 
do  it  with  the  utmost  confidence  in  figures. 

I  select  as  a  representative  vegetable,  in  order 
to  estimate  the  cost  of  gardening,  the  potato. 
In  my  statement,  I  shall  not  include  the  interest 
on  the  value  of  the  land.  I  throw  in  the  land, 
because  it  would  otherwise  have  stood  idle :  the 
thing  generally  raised  on  city  land  is  taxes.  I 
therefore  make  the  following  statement  of  the 
cost  and  income  of  my  potato-crop,  a  part  of 
it  estimated  in  connection  with  other  garden 


148  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

labor.     I  have  tried  to  make  it  so  as  to  satisfy 
the  income-tax  collector  :  — 

Dr. 

Ploughing $  0.50 

Seed 1.50 

Manure 8.00 

Assistance  in  planting  and  digging,  3  days 6.75 

Labor  of  self  in  planting,   hoeing,  digging, 

picking  up,  5  days  at  1 7  cents .85 

Total  cost $  17.60 

Cr. 

Two  thousand  five  hundred  mealy  potatoes,  at 

2  cents $  50.00 

Small  potatoes  given  to  neighbor's  pig .50 

Total  return 5O-5O 

Balance,  profit  in  cellar 32.90 

Some  of  these  items  need  explanation.  I 
have  charged  nothing  for  my  own  time  waiting 
for  the  potatoes  to  grow.  My  time  in  hoeing, 
fighting  weeds,  &c.,  is  put  in  at  five  days :  it 
may  have  been  a  little  more.  Nor  have  I  put 
in  anything  for  cooling  drinks  while  hoeing. 
I  leave  this  out  from  principle,  because  I  al* 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    149 

ways  recommend  water  to  others.  I  had  some 
difficulty  in  fixing  the  rate  of  my  own  wages. 
It  was  the  first  time  that  I  had  an  opportunity 
of  paying  what  I  thought  labor  was  worth  ;  and 
I  determined  to  make  a  good  thing  of  it  for  once. 
I  figured  it  right  down  to  European  prices, — 
seventeen  cents  a  day  for  unskilled  labor.  Of 
course,  I  boarded  myself.  I  ought  to  say  that  I 
fixed  the  wages  after  the  work  was  done,  or  I 
might  have  been  tempted  to  do  as  some  masons 
did  who  worked  for  me  at  four  dollars  a  day. 
They  lay  in  the  shade  and  slept  the  sleep  of 
honest  toil  full  half  the  time,  —  at  least  all  the 
time  I  was  away.  I  have  reason  to  believe  that 
when  the  wages  of  mechanics  are  raised  to  eight 
and  ten  dollars  a  day,  the  workmen  will  not  come 
at  all :  they  will  merely  send  their  cards. 

I  do  not  see  any  possible  fault  in  the  above 
figures.  I  ought  to  say  that  I  deferred  putting 
a  value  on  the  potatoes  until  I  had  footed  up  the 


150  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

debit  column.  This  is  always  the  safest  way  to 
do.  I  had  twenty-five  bushels.  I  roughly  esti 
mated  that  there  are  one  hundred  good  ones  to 
the  bushel.  Making  my  own  market  price,  I 
asked  two  cents  apiece  for  them.  This  I  should 
have  considered  dirt  cheap  last  June,  when  I  was 
going  down  the  rows  with  the  hoe.  If  any  one 
thinks  that  two  cents  each  is  high,  let  him  try  to 
raise  them. 

Nature  is  "  awful  smart."  I  intend  to  be  com 
plimentary  in  saying  so.  She  shows  it  in  little 
things.  I  have  mentioned  my  attempt  to  put 
in  a  few  modest  turnips,  near  the  close  of  the 
season.  I  sowed  the  seeds,  by  the  way,  in  the 
most  liberal  manner.  Into  three  or  four  short 
rows  I  presume  I  put  enough  to  sow  an  acre  ; 
and  they  all  came  up,  —  came  up  as  thick  as 
grass,  as  crowded  and  useless  as  babies  in  a 
Chinese  village.  Of  course,  they  had  to  be 
thinned  out ;  that  is,  pretty  much  all  pulled 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    151 

up  ;  and  it  took  me  a  long  time  ;  for  it  takes 
a  conscientious  man  some  time  to  decide  which 
are  the  best  and  healthiest  plants  to  spare.  Af 
ter  all,  I  spared  too  many.  That  is  the  great 
danger  everywhere  in  this  world  (it  may  not  be 
in  the  next)  ;  things  are  too  thick  :  we  lose  all 
in  grasping  for  too  much.  The  Scotch  say,  that 
310  man  ought  to  thin  out  his  own  turnips,  be 
cause  he  will  not  sacrifice  enough  to  leave  room 
for  the  remainder  to  grow :  h „  should  get  his 
neighbor,  who  does  not  care  for  the  plants,  to 
do  it.  But  this  is  mere  talk,  and  aside  from  the 
point :  if  there  is  anything  I  desire  to  avoid  in 
these  agricultural  papers,  it  is  digression.  I  did 
think  that  putting  in  these  turnips  so  late  in  the 
season,  when  general  activity  has  ceased,  and  in 
a  remote  part  of  the  garden,  they  would  pass 
unnoticed.  But  Nature  never  even  winks,  as  I 
can  see.  The  tender  blades  were  scarcely  out 
of  the  ground  when  she  sent  a  small  black  fly, 


152  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

which  seemed  to  have  been  born  and  held  in 
reserve  for  this  purpose,  —  to  cut  the  leaves. 
They  speedily  made  lace-work  of  the  whole  bed. 
Thus  everything  appears  to  have  its  special  ene 
my,  —  except,  perhaps,  p y  :  nothing  ever 

troubles  that. 

Did  the  Concord  Grape  ever  come  to  more 
luscious  perfection  than  this  year  ?  or  yield  so 
abundantly  ?  The  golden  sunshine  has  passed 
into  them,  and  distended  their  purple  skins  al* 
most  to  bursting.  Such  heavy  clusters  !  such 
bloom  !  such  sweetness !  such  meat  and  drink 
in  their  round  globes  !  What  a  fine  fellow  Bac 
chus  would  have  been,  if  he  had  only  signed 
the  pledge  when  he  was  a  young  man  !  I  have 
taken  off  clusters  that  were  as  compact  and  al 
most  as  large  as  the  Black  Hamburgs.  It  is 
slow  work  picking  them.  I  do  not  see  how 
the  gatherers  for  the  vintage  ever  get  off  enough. 
It  takes  so  long  to  disentangle  the  bunches  from 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    153 

the  leaves  and  the  interlacing  vines  and  the 
supporting  tendrils  ;  and  then  I  like  to  hold  up 
each  bunch  and  look  at  it  in  the  sunlight,  and 
get  the  fragrance  and  the  bloom  of  it,  and  show 
it  to  Polly,  who  is  making  herself  useful,  as 
taster  and  companion,  at  the  foot  of  the  ladder, 
before  dropping  it  into  the  basket.  But  we  have 
other  company.  The  robin,  the  most  knowing 
and  greedy  bird  out  of  paradise  (I  trust  he  will 
always  be  kept  out),  has  discovered  that  the 
grape-crop  is  uncommonly  good,  and  has  come 
back,  with  his  whole  tribe  and  family,  larger 
than  it  was  in  pea-time.  He  knows  the  ripest 
bunches  as  well  as  anybody,  and  tries  them  all. 
If  he  would  take  a  whole  bunch  here  and  there, 
say  half  the  number,  and  be  off  with  it,  I  should 
not  so  much  care.  But  he  will  not.  He  pecks 
away  at  all  the  bunches,  and  spoils  as  many  as 
he  can.  It  is  time  he  went  south. 

There  is  no  prettier  sight,  to  my  eye,  than  a 
7* 


154  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

gardener  on  a  ladder  in  his  grape-arbor,  in  these 
golden  days,  selecting  the  heaviest  clusters  of 
grapes,  and  handing  them  down  to  one  and 
another  of  a  group  of  neighbors  and  friends, 
who  stand  under  the  shade  of  the  leaves,  flecked 
with  the  sunlight,  and  cry,  "  How  sweet ! " 
"  What  nice  ones  !  "  and  the  like,  —  remarks 
encouraging  to  the  man  on  the  ladder.  It  is 
great  pleasure  to  see  people  eat  grapes. 

Moral  Truth.  —  I  have  no  doubt  that  grapes 
taste  best  in  other  peoples'  mouths.  It  is  an 
old  notion  that  it  is  easier  to  be  generous  than 
to  be  stingy.  I  am  convinced  that  the  majority 
of  people  would  be  generous  from  selfish  mo 
tives,  if  they  had  the  opportunity. 

Philosophical  Observation.  —  Nothing  shows 
one  who  his  friends  are  like  prosperity  and 
ripe  fruit.  I  had  a  good  friend  in  the  country, 
whom  I  almost  never  visited  except  in  cherry 
time.  By  your  fruits  you  shall  know  them. 


"  IV/iat  nice  ones  /  "  —  Page  1 54. 


SEVENTEENTH     WEEK. 

LIKE  to  go  into  the  garden  these  warm 
latter  days,  and  muse.  To  muse  is  to 
sit  in  the  sun,  and  not  think  of  any 
thing.  I  am  not  sure  but  goodness  comes  out 
of  people  who  bask  in  the  sun,  as  it  does  out 
of  a  sweet  apple  roasted  before  the  fire.  The 
late  September  and  October  sun  of  this  latitude 
is  something  like  the  sun  of  extreme  Lower 
Italy :  you  can  stand  a  good  deal  of  it,  and 
apparently  soak  a  winter  supply  into  the  sys 
tem.  If  one  only  could  take  in  his  winter  fuel 
in  this  way  !  The  next  great  discovery  will, 
very  likely,  be  the  conservation  of  sunlight. 
In  the  correlation  of  forces,  I  look  to  see  the 


156  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

day  when  the  superfluous  sunshine  will  be  util 
ized  ;  as,  for  instance,  that  which  has  burned 
up  my  celery  this  year  will  be  converted  into 
a  force  to  work  the  garden. 

This  sitting  in  the  sun  amid  the  evidences 
of  a  ripe  year  is  the  easiest  part  of  gardening  I 
have  experienced.  But  what  a  combat  has  gone 
on  here  !  What  vegetable  passions  have  run  the 
whole  gamut  of  ambition,  selfishness,  greed  of 
place,  fruition,  satiety,  and  now  rest  here  in  the 
truce  of  exhaustion !  What  a  battle-field,  if  one 
may  look  upon  it  so  !  The  corn  has  lost  its  am 
munition,  and  stacked  arms  in  a  slovenly,  militia 
sort  of  style.  The  ground  vines  are  torn,  tram 
pled,  and  withered  ;  and  the  ungathered  cucum 
bers,  worthless  melons,  and  golden  squashes  lie 
about  like  the  spent  bombs  and  exploded  shells 
of  a  battle-field.  So  the  cannon-balls  lay  on 
the  sandy  plain  before  Fort  Fisher  after  the 
capture.  So  the  great  grassy  meadow  at  Mu- 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    157 

nich,  any  morning  during  the  October  Fest, 
is  strewn  with  the  empty  beer-mugs.  History 
constantly  repeats  itself.  There  is  a  large  crop 
of  moral  reflections  in  my  garden,  which  any 
body  is  at  liberty  to  gather  who  passes  this 
way. 

I  have  tried  to  get  in  anything  that  offered 
temptation  to  sin.  There  would  be  no  thieves  if 
there  was  nothing  to  steal ;  and  I  suppose,  in  the 
thieves'  catechism,  the  provider  is  as  bad  as  the 
thief;  and,  probably,  I  am  to  blame  for  leaving 
out  a  few  winter-pears,  which  some  predatory 
boy  carried  off  on  Sunday.  At  first  I  was 
angry,  and  said  I  should  like  to  have  caught 
the  urchin  in  the  act ;  but,  on  second  thought, 
I  was  glad  I  did  not.  The  interview  could  not 
have  been  pleasant.  I  should  n't  have  known 
what  to  do  with  him.  The  chances  are,  that 
he  would  have  escaped  away  with  his  pockets 
full,  and  jibed  at  me  from  a  safe  distance.  And, 


158  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

if  I  had  got  my  hands  on  him,  I  should  have 
been  still  more  embarrassed.  If  I  had  flogged 
him,  he  would  have  got  over  it  a  good  deal 
sooner  than  I  should.  That  sort  of  boy  does 
not  mind  castigation  any  more  than  he  does 
tearing  his  trousers  in  the  briers.  If  I  had 
treated  him  with  kindness,  and  conciliated  him 
with  grapes,  showing  him  the  enormity  of  his 
offence,  I  suppose  he  would  have  come  the 
next  night,  and  taken  the  remainder  of  the 
grapes.  The  truth  is,  that  the  public  morality 
is  lax  on  the  subject  of  fruit.  If  anybody  puts 
arsenic  or  gunpowder  into  his  watermelons,  he 
is  universally  denounced  as  a  stingy  old  mur 
derer  by  the  community.  A  great  many  people 
regard  growing  fruit  as  lawful  prey,  who  would 
not  think  of  breaking  into  your  cellar  to  take 
it.  I  found  a  man  once  in  my  raspberry-bushes, 
early  in  the  season,  when  we  were  waiting  for 
a  dishful  to  ripen.  Upon  inquiring  what  he 


•  He  said  he  was  only  eating  some"  —  Page  159. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     159 

was  about,  he  said  he  was  only  eating  some  ; 
and  the  operation  seemed  to  be  so  natural  and 
simple,  that  I  disliked  to  disturb  him.  And  I 
am  not  very  sure  that  one  has  a  right  to  the 
whole  of  an  abundant  crop  of  fruit  until  he  has 
gathered  it.  At  least,  in  a  city  garden,  one 
might  as  well  conform  his  theory  to  the  prac 
tice  of  the  community. 

As  for  children  (and  it  sometimes  looks  as  if 
the  chief  products  of  my  garden  were  small  boys 
and  hens),  it  is  admitted  that  they  are  barba 
rians.  There  is  no  exception  among  them  to 
this  condition  of  barbarism.  This  is  not  to  say 
that  they  are  not  attractive  ;  for  they  have  the 
virtues  as  well  as  the  vices  of  a  primitive  people. 
It  is  held  by  some  naturalists  that  the  child 
is  only  a  zoophyte,  with  a  stomach,  and  feelers 
radiating  from  it  in  search  of  something  to  fill 
it.  It  is  true  that  a  child  is  always  hungry  all 
over :  but  he  is  also  curious  all  over  ;  and  his 


I6O  MY    SUMMER    IN    A    GARDEN. 

curiosity  is  excited  about  as  early  as  his  hunger. 
He  immediately  begins  to  put  out  his  moral 
feelers  into  the  unknown  and  the  infinite  to 
discover  what  sort  of  an  existence  this  is  into 
which  he  has  come.  His  imagination  is  quite 
as  hungry  as  his  stomach.  And  again  and 
again  it  is  stronger  than  his  other  appetites. 
You  can  easily  engage  his  imagination  in  a 
story  which  will  make  him  forget  his  dinner. 
He  is  credulous  and  superstitious,  and  open  to 
all  wonder.  In  this,  he  is  exactly  like  the  sav 
age  races.  Both  gorge  themselves  on  the  mar 
vellous  ;  and  all  the  unknown  is  marvellous  to 
them.  I  know  the  general  impression  is  that 
children  must  be  governed  through  their  stom 
achs.  I  think  they  can  be  controlled  quite  as 
well  through  their  curiosity ;  that  being  the 
more  craving  and  imperious  of  the  two.  I 
have  seen  children  follow  about  a  person  who 
told  them  stories,  and  interested  them  with  his 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     l6l 

charming  talk,  as  greedily  as  if  his  pockets  had 
been  full  of  bon-bons. 

Perhaps  this  fact  has  no  practical  relation  to 
gardening  ;  but  it  occurs  to  me  that,  if  I  should 
paper  the  outside  of  my  high  board  fence  with 
the  leaves  of  "  The  Arabian  Nights,"  it  would 
afford  me  a  good  deal  of  protection, — more,  in 
fact,  than  spikes  in  the  top,  which  tear  trousers 
and  encourage  profanity,  but  do  not  save  much 
fruit.  A  spiked  fence  is  a  challenge  to  any 
boy  of  spirit.  But  if  the  fence  were  papered 
with  fairy-tales,  would  he  not  stop  to  read  them 
until  it  was  too  late  for  him  to  climb  into  the 
garden  ?  I  don't  know.  Human  nature  is  vi 
cious.  The  boy  might  regard  the  picture  of  the 
garden  of  the  Hesperides  only  as  an  advertise 
ment  of  what  was  over  the  fence.  I  begin  to 
find  that  the  problem  of  raising  fruit  is  nothing 
to  that  of  getting  it  after  it  has  matured.  So 
long  as  the  law,  just  in  many  respects,  is  in 


102  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

force  against  shooting  birds  and  small  boys, 
the  gardener  may  sow  in  tears  and  reap  in 
vain. 

The  power  of  a  boy  is,  to  me,  something 
fearful.  Consider  what  he  can  do.  You  buy 
and  set  out  a  choice  pear-tree  ;  you  enrich  the 
earth  for  it ;  you  train  and  trim  it,  and  van 
quish  the  borer,  and  watch  its  slow  growth. 
At  length  it  rewards  your  care  by  producing 
two  or  three  pears,  which  you  cut  up  and  divide 
in  the  family,  declaring  the  flavor  of  the  bit 
you  eat  to  be  something  extraordinary.  The 
next  year,  the  little  tree  blossoms  full,  and  sets 
well ;  and  in  the  autumn  has  on  its  slender, 
drooping  limbs  half  a  bushel  of  fruit,  daily 
growing  more  delicious  in  the  sun.  You  show 
it  to  your  friends,  reading  to  them  the  French 
name,  which  you  can  never  remember,  on  the 
label ;  and  you  take  an  honest  pride  in  the 
successful  fruit  of  long  care.  That  night  youi 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    163 

pears  shall  be  required  of  you  by  a  boy  !  Along 
comes  an  irresponsible  urchin,  who  has  not  been 
growing  much  longer  than  the  tree,  with  not 
twenty-five  cents'  worth  of  clothing  on  him, 
and  in  five  minutes  takes  off  every  pear,  and 
retires  into  safe  obscurity.  In  five  minutes 
the  remorseless  boy  has  undone  your  work  of 
years,  and  with  the  easy  nonchalance,  I  doubt 
not,  of  any  agent  of  fate,  in  whose  path  nothing 
is  sacred  or  safe. 

And  it  is  not  of  much  consequence.  The  boy 
goes  on  his  way,  —  to  Congress,  or  to  State 
Prison  :  in  either  place  he  will  be  accused  of 
stealing,  perhaps  wrongfully.  You  learn,  in 
time,  that  it  is  better  to  have  had  pears  and 
lost  them  than  not  to  have  had  pears  at  all. 
You  come  to  know  that  the  least  (and  rarest) 
part  of  the  pleasure  of  raising  fruit  is  the  vulgar 
sating  it.  You  recall  your  delight  in  conversing 
with  the  nurseryman,  and  looking  at  his  illus' 


164  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

trated  catalogues,  where  all  the  pears  are  drawn 
perfect  in  form,  and  of  extra  size,  and  at  that 
exact  moment  between  ripenesss  and  decay 
which  it  is  so  impossible  to  hit  in  practice. 
Fruit  cannot  be  raised  on  this  earth  to  taste  as 
you  imagine  those  pears  would  taste.  For  years 
you  have  this  pleasure,  unalloyed  by  any  disen 
chanting  reality.  How  you  watch  the  tender 
twigs  in  spring,  and  the  freshly  forming  bark, 
hovering  about  the  healthy  growing  tree  with 
your  pruning-knife  many  a  sunny  morning ! 
That  is  happiness.  Then,  if  you  know  it,  you 
are  drinking  the  very  wine  of  life  ;  and  when 
the  sweet  juices  of  the  earth  mount  the  limbs, 
and  flow  down  the  tender  stem,  ripening  and 
reddening  the  pendent  fruit,  you  feel  that  you 
somehow  stand  at  the  source  of  things,  and  have 
no  unimportant  share  in  the  processes  of  Nature. 
Enter  at  this  moment  boy  the  destroyer,  whose 
office  is  that  of  preserver  as  well ;  for,  though 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING. 


165 


he  removes  the  fruit  from  your  sight,  it  remains 
in  your  memory  immortally  ripe  and  desirable. 
The  gardener  needs  all  these  consolations  of  a 
high  philosophy. 


EIGHTEENTH    WEEK. 

EGRETS  are  idle  ;  yet  history  is  one 
long  regret.  Everything  might  have 
turned  out  so  differently  !  If  Ravail- 
lac  had  not  been  imprisoned  for  debt,  he  would 
not  have  stabbed  Henry  of  Navarre.  If  Wil 
liam  of  Orange  had  escaped  assassination  by 
Philip's  emissaries  ;  if  France  had  followed  the 
French  Calvin,  and  embraced  Protestant  Cal 
vinism,  as  it  came  very  near  doing  towards  the 
end  of  the  sixteenth  century  ;  if  the  Continen 
tal  ammunition  had  not  given  out  at  Bunker's 
Hill ;  if  Blucher  had  not  "  come  up "  at  Water 
loo,  —  the  lesson  is,  that  things  do  not  come  up 
unless  they  are  planted.  When  you  go  behind 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    l6/ 

the  historical  scenery,  you  find  there  is  a  rope 
and  pulley  to  effect  every  transformation  which 
has  astonished  you.  It  was  the  rascality  of  a 
minister  and  a  contractor  five  years  before  that 
lost  the  battle  ;  and  the  cause  of  the  defeat  was 
worthless  ammunition.  I  should  like  to  know 
how  many  wars  have  been  caused  by  fits  of 
indigestion,  and  how  many  more  dynasties  have 
been  upset  by  the  love  of  woman  than  by  the 
hate  of  man.  It  is  only  because  we  are  ill  in 
formed  that  anything  surprises  us  ;  and  we  are 
disappointed  because  we  expect  that  for  which 
we  have  not  provided. 

I  had  too  vague  expectations  of  what  my 
garden  would  do  of  itself.  A  garden  ought  to 
produce  one  everything, — just  as  a  business 
ought  to  support  a  man,  and  a  house  ought 
to  keep  itself.  We  had  a  convention  lately  to 
resolve  that  the  house  should  keep  itself;  but 
it  won't.  There  has  been  a  lively  time  in  our 


1 68  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

garden  this  summer  ;  but  it  seems  to  me  there 
is  very  little  to  show  for  it.  It  has  been  a  ter 
rible  campaign  ;  but  where  is  the  indemnity  ? 
Where  are  all  "  sass "  and  Lorraine  ?  It  is 
true  that  we  have  lived  on  the  country  ;  but 
we  desire,  besides,  the  fruits  of  the  war.  There 
are  no  onions,  for  one  thing.  I  am  quite 
ashamed  to  take  people  into  my  garden,  and 
have  them  notice  the  absence  of  onions.  It 
is  very  marked.  In  onion  is  strength  ;  and  a 
garden  without  it  lacks  flavor.  The  onion  in 
its  satin  wrappings  is  among  the  most  beauti 
ful  of  vegetables  ;  and  it  is  the  only  one  that 
represents  the  essence  of  things.  It  can  al 
most  be  said  to  have  a  soul.  You  take  off  coat 
after  coat,  and  the  onion  is  still  there  ;  and, 
when  the  last  one  is  removed,  who  dare  say 
that  the  onion  itself  is  destroyed,  though  you 
can  weep  over  its  departed  spirit  ?  If  there  is 
any  one  thing  on  this  fallen  earth  that  the  angels 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     169 

in  heaven  weep  over  more  than  another,  it  is  the 
onion. 

I  know  that  there  is  supposed  to  be  a  preju 
dice  against  the  onion  ;  but  I  think  there  is 
rather  a  cowardice  in  regard  to  it.  I  doubt  not 
that  all  men  and  women  love  the  onion  ;  but 
few  confess  their  love.  Affection  for  it  is  con 
cealed.  Good  New-Englanders  are  as  shy  of 
owning  it  as  they  are  of  talking  about  religion. 
Some  people  have  days  on  which  they  eat 
onions,  —  what  you  might  call  "  retreats,"  or 
their  "  Thursdays."  The  act  is  in  the  nature 
of  a  religious  ceremony,  an  Eleusinian  mys 
tery  ;  not  a  breath  of  it  must  get  abroad.  On 
that  day  they  see  no  company ;  they  deny  the 
kiss  of  greeting  to  the  dearest  friend ;  they 
retire  within  themselves,  and  hold  communion 
with  one  of  the  most  pungent  and  penetrating 
manifestations  of  the  moral  vegetable  world. 
Happy  is  said  to  be  the  family  which  can  eat 
3 


I/O  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

onions  together.  They  are,  for  the  time  being, 
separate  from  the  world,  and  have  a  harmony  of 
aspiration.  There  is  a  hint  here  for  the  reform 
ers.  Let  them  become  apostles  of  the  onion ; 
let  them  eat,  and  preach  it  to  their  fellows,  and 
circulate  tracts  of  it  in  the  form  of  seeds.  In 
the  onion  is  the  hope  of  universal  brotherhood. 
If  all  men  will  eat  onions  at  all  times,  they  will 
come  into  a  universal  sympathy.  Look  at  Italy. 
I  hope  I  am  not  mistaken  as  to  the  cause  of  her 
unity.  It  was  the  Reds  who  preached  the  gospel 
which  made  it  possible.  All  the  Reds  of  Eu 
rope,  all  the  sworn  devotees  of  the  mystic  Mary 
Ann,  eat  of  the  common  vegetable.  Their  oaths 
are  strong  with  it.  It  is  the  food,  also,  of  the 
common  people  of  Italy.  All  the  social  atmos 
phere  of  that  delicious  land  is  laden  with  it. 
Its  odor  is  a  practical  democracy.  In  the 
churches  all  are  alike :  there  is  one  faith,  one 
smell.  The  entrance  of  Victor  Emanuel  into 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT   GARDENING.          I/I 

Rome  is  only  the  pompous  proclamation  of  a 
unity  which  garlic  had  already  accomplished ; 
and  yet  we,  who  boast  of  our  democracy,  eat 
onions  in  secret. 

I  now  see  that  I  have  left  out  many  of  the 
most  moral  elements.  Neither  onions,  parsnips, 
carrots,  nor  cabbages  are  here.  I  have  never 
seen  a  garden  in  the  autumn  before,  without 
the  uncouth  cabbage  in  it;  but  my  garden 
gives  the  impression  of  a  garden  without  a 
head.  The  cabbage  is  the  rose  of  Holland.  I 
admire  the  force  by  which  it  compacts  its  crisp 
leaves  into  a  solid  head.  The  secret  of  it  would 
be  priceless  to  the  world.  We  should  see  less 
expansive  foreheads  with  nothing  within.  Even 
the  largest  cabbages  are  not  always  the  best. 
But  I  mention  these  things,  not  from  any  sym 
pathy  I  have  with  the  vegetables  named,  but  to 
show  how  hard  it  is  to  go  contrary  to  the  expec- 
of  society.  Society  expects  every  man 


1/2  MY   SUMMER   IN   A    GARDEN. 

to  have  certain  things  in  his  garden.  Not  to 
raise  cabbage  is  as  if  one  had  no  pew  in  church. 
Perhaps  we  shall  come  some  day  to  free  churches 
and  free  gardens  ;  when  I  can  show  my  neighbor 
through  my  tired  garden,  at  the  end  of  the  sea 
son,  when  skies  are  overcast,  and  brown  leaves 
are  swirling  down,  and  not  mind  if  he  does  raise 
his  eyebrows  when  he  observes,  "  Ah  !  I  see 
you  have  none  of  this,  and  of  that."  At  pres 
ent  we  want  the  moral  courage  to  plant  only 
what  we  need  ;  to  spend  only  what  will  bring 
us  peace,  regardless  of  what  is  going  on  over 
the  fence.  We  are  half  ruined  by  conformity  ; 
but  we  should  be  wholly  ruined  without  it :  and 
I  presume  I  shall  make  a  garden  next  year  that 
will  be  as  popular  as  possible. 

And  this  brings  me  to  what  I  see  may  be  a 
crisis  in  life.  I  begin  to  feel  the  temptation  of 
experiment.  Agriculture,  horticulture,  floricul 
ture,  —  these  are  vast  fields,  into  which  one  may 


WHAT  1  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    1/3 

wander  away,  and  never  be  seen  more.  It 
seemed  to  me  a  very  simple  thing,  this  garden 
ing  ;  but  it  opens  up  astonishingly.  It  is  like 
the  infinite  possibilities  in  worsted-work.  Polly 
sometimes  says  to  me,  "  I  wish  you  would  call 
at  Bobbin's,  and  match  that  skein  of  worsted  for 
me  when  you  are  in  town."  Time  was  I  used 
to  accept  such  a  commission  with  alacrity  and 
self-confidence.  I  went  to  Bobbin's,  and  asked 
one  of  his  young  men,  with  easy  indifference,  to 
give  me  some  of  that.  The  young  man,  who  is 
as  handsome  a  young  man  as  ever  I  looked  at, 
and  who  appears  to  own  the  shop,  and  whose 
suave  superciliousness  would  be  worth  every 
thing  to  a  cabinet  minister  who  wanted  to 
repel  applicants  for  place,  says,  "  I  have  n't  an 
ounce:  I  have  sent  to  Paris,  and  I  expect  it 
every  day.  I  have  a  good  deal  of  difficulty  in 
getting  that  shade  in  my  assortment."  To  think 
that  he  is  in  communication  with  Paris,  and 


MY   SUMMER  IN   A   GARDEN. 

perhaps  wiih  Persia  !  Respect  for  such  a  being 
gives  place  to  awe.  I  go  to  another  shop,  hold- 
ing  fast  to  my  scarlet  clew.  There  I  am  shown 
a  heap  of  stuff,  with  more  colors  and  shades  thai) 
I  had  supposed  existed  in  all  the  world.  What 
a  blaze  of  distraction !  I  have  been  told  to  get 
as  near  the  shade  as  I  could  ;  and  so  I  compare 
and  contrast,  till  the  whole  thing  seems  to  me 
about  of  one  color.  But  I  can  settle  my  mind 
on  nothing.  The  affair  assumes  a  high  degree 
of  importance.  I  am  satisfied  with  nothing  but 
perfection.  I  don't  know  what  may  happen  if 
the  shade  is  not  matched.  I  go  to  another  shop, 
and  another,  and  another.  At  last  a  pretty  girl, 
who  could  make  any  customer  believe  that  green 
is  blue,  matches  the  shade  in  a  minute.  I  buy 
five  cents'  worth.  That  was  the  order.  Women 
are  the  most  economical  persons  that  ever  were. 
t  have  spent  two  hours  in  this  five-cent  business  ; 
but  who  shall  say  they  were  wasted,  when  I  take 


'  Polly  says  it  is  a  perfect  match.'1''  —  Page  175. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     1 75 

the  stuff  home,  and  Polly  says  it  is  a  perfect 
match,  and  looks  so  pleased,  and  holds  it  up 
with  the  work,  at  arm's  length,  and  turns  her 
head  one  side,  and  then  takes  her  needle,  and 
works  it  in  ?  Working  in,  I  can  see,  my  own 
obligingness  and  amiability  with  every  stitch. 
Five  cents  is  dirt  cheap  for  such  a  pleasure. 

The  things  I  may  do  in  my  garden  multiply 
on  my  vision.  How  fascinating  have  the  cata 
logues  of  the  nurserymen  become  !  Can  I  raise 
all  those  beautiful  varieties,  each  one  of  which 
is  preferable  to  the  other  ?  Shall  I  try  all  the 
kinds  of  grapes,  and  all  the  sorts  of  pears  ?  I 
have  already  fifteen  varieties  of  strawberries 
(vines)  ;  and  I  have  no  idea  that  I  have  hit 
the  right  one.  Must  I  subscribe  to  all  the  mag 
azines  and  weekly  papers  which  offer  premiums 
of  the  best  vines  ?  O  that  all  the  strawberries 
were  rolled  into  one,  that  I  could  enclose  all 
its  lusciousness  in  one  bite .'  O  for  the  good  old 


176  MY    SUMMKR    IN   A   GARDEN. 

days  when  a  strawberry  was  a  strawberry,  and 
there  was  no  perplexity  about  it !  There  are 
more  berries  now  than  churches  ;  and  no  one 
knows  what  to  believe.  I  have  seen  gardens 
which  were  all  experiment,  given  over  to  every 
new  thing,  and  which  produced  little  or  nothing 
to  the  owners,  except  the  pleasure  of  expectation. 
People  grow  pear-trees  at  great  expense  of  time 
and  money,  which  never  yield  them  more  than 
four  pears  to  the  tree.  The  fashions  of  ladies' 
bonnets  are  nothing  to  the  fashions  of  nursery 
men.  He  who  attempts  to  follow  them  has  a 
business  for  life  ;  but  his  life  may  be  short. 
If  I  enter  upon  this  wide  field  of  horticultural 
experiment,  I  shall  leave  peace  behind ;  and  I 
may  expect  the  ground  to  open,  and  swallow  me 
and  all  my  fortune.  May  Heaven  keep  me  to 
the  old  roots  and  herbs  of  my  forefathers ! 
Perhaps  in  the  world  of  modern  reforms  this 
is  not  possible  ;  but  I  intend  now  to  cultivate 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING. 


177 


only  the  standard  things,  and  learn  to  talk 
knowingly  of  the  rest.  Of  course,  one  must 
keep  up  a  reputation.  I  have  seen  people 
greatly  enjoy  themselves,  and  elevate  themselves 
in  their  own  esteem,  in  a  wise  and  critical  talk 
about  all  the  choice  wines,  while  they  were 
sipping  a  decoction,  the  original  cost  of  which 
bore  no  relation  to  the  price  of  grapes. 


NINETEENTH    WEEK. 

HE  closing  scenes  are  not  necessarily 
funereal.  A  garden  should  be  got 
ready  for  winter  as  well  as  for  sum 
mer.  When  one  goes  into  winter-quarters  he 
wants  everything  neat  and  trig.  Expecting 
high  winds,  we  bring  everything  into  close 
reef.  Some  men  there  are  who  never  shave 
(if  they  are  so  absurd  as  ever  to  shave),  ex 
cept  when  they  go  abroad,  and  who  do  not 
take  care  to  wear  polished  boots  in  the  bosoms 
of  their  families.  I  like  a  man  who  shaves 
(next  to  one  who  does  n't  shave)  to  satisfy  his 
own  conscience,  and  not  for  display,  and  who 
dresses  as  neatly  at  home  as  he  does  anywhere. 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.     179 

Such  a  man  will  be  likely  to  put"  his  garden  in 
complete  order  before  the  snow  comes,  so  that 
its  last  days  shall  not  present  a  scene  of  melan 
choly  ruin  and  decay. 

I  confess  that,  after  such  an  exhausting  cam 
paign,  I  felt  a  great  temptation  to  retire,  and 
call  it  a  drawn  engagement.  But  better  coun 
sels  prevailed.  I  determined  that  the  weeds 
should  not  sleep  on  the  field  of  battle.  I 
routed  them  out,  and  levelled  their  works.  I 
am  master  of  the  situation.  If  I  have  made  a 
desert,  I  at  least  have  peace  ;  but  it  is  not  quite 
a  desert.  The  strawberries,  the  raspberries,  the 
celery,  the  turnips,  wave  green  above  the  clean 
earth,  with  no  enemy  in  sight.  In  these  golden 
October  days  no  work  is  more  fascinating  than 
this  getting  ready  for  spring.  The  sun  is  no 
longer  a  burning  enemy,  but  a  friend,  illuminat 
ing  all  the  open  space,  and  warming  the  mellow 
soil.  And  the  pruning  and  clearing-away  of 


ISO  MY   SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

rubbish,  and  the  fertilizing,  go  on  with  some 
thing  of  the  hilarity  of  a  wake,  rather  than 
the  despondency  of  other  funerals.  When  the 
wind  begins  to  come  out  of  the  northwest  of 
set  purpose,  and  to  sweep  the  ground  with  low 
and  searching  fierceness,  very  different  from  the 
roystering,  jolly  bluster  of  early  fall,  I  have  put 
the  strawberries  under  their  coverlet  of  leaves, 
pruned  the  grapevines  and  laid  them  under  the 
soil,  tied  up  the  tender  plants,  given  the  fruit- 
trees  a  good,  solid  meal  about  the  roots  ;  and 
so  I  turn  away,  writing  Resurgam  on  the  gate 
post.  And  Calvin,  aware  that  the  summer  is 
past  and  the  harvest  is  ended,  and  that  a  mouse 
in  the  kitchen  is  worth  two  birds  gone  south, 
scampers  away  to  the  house  with  his  tail  in  the 
air. 

And  yet  I  am  not  perfectly  at  rest  in  my  mind. 
I  know  that  this  is  only  a  truce  until  the  parties 
recover  their  exhausted  energies.  All  wintei 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    l8l 

long  the  forces  of  chemistry  will  be  mustering 
under   ground,  repairing   the   losses,  calling   up 
the  reserves,  getting  new  strength  from  my  sur 
face-fertilizing    bounty,   and    making   ready   for 
the  spring  campaign.     They  will  open  it  before 
I  am  ready  :  while  the  snow  is  scarcely  melted, 
and  the  ground  is  not  passable,  they  will  begin 
to  move  on  my  works  ;  and  the  fight  will  com 
mence.     Yet  how  deceitfully  it  will  open  to  the 
music  of  birds  and  the  soft  enchantment  of  the 
spring  mornings  !     I  shall  even  be  permitted  to 
win   a   few   skirmishes  :    the   secret   forces   will 
even   wait  for  me  to  plant  and  sow,  and  show 
my  full   hand,   before   they   come   on   in   heavy 
and    determined    assault.      There    are    already 
signs    of   an   internecine   fight  with   the   devil- 
grass,   which   has    intrenched   itself  in   a   con 
siderable  portion  of  my  garden-patch.     It  con 
tests  the  ground  inch  by  inch  ;  and  digging  it 
out  is  very  much  such  labor  as  eating  a  piece 


1 82  MY    SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

of  choke-cherry  pie  with  the  stones  all  in.  It 
is  work,  too,  that  I  know  by  experience  I  snail 
have  to  do  alone.  Every  man  must  eradicate 
his  own  devil-grass.  The  neighbors  who  have 
leisure  to  help  you  in  grape-picking  time  are 
all  busy  when  devil-grass  is  most  aggressive. 
My  neighbors'  visits  are  well  timed  :  it  is  only 
their  hens  which  have  all  seasons  for  their  own. 
I  am  told  that  abundant  and  rank  weeds  are 
signs  of  a  rich  soil ;  but  I  have  noticed  that  a 
thin,  poor  soil  grows  little  but  weeds.  I  am 
inclined  to  think  that  the  substratum  is  the 
same,  and  that  the  only  choice  in  this  world  is 
what  kind  of  weeds  you  will  have.  I  am  not 
much  attracted  by  the  gaunt,  flavorless  mullein, 
and  the  wiry  thistle  of  upland  country  pastures, 
where  the  grass  is  always  gray,  as  if  the  world 
were  already  weary  and  sick  of  life.  The  awk 
ward,  uncouth  wickedness  of  remote  country- 
places,  where  culture  has  died  out  after  the 


WHAT  I  KNOW  ABOUT  GARDENING.    183 

first  crop,  is  about  as  disagreeable  as  the  ranker 
and  richer  vice  of  city  life,  forced  by  artificial 
heat  and  the  juices  of  an  overfed  civilization. 
There  is  no  doubt  that,  on  the  whole,  the  rich 
soil  is  the  best :  the  fruit  of  it  has  body  and 
flavor.  To  what  affluence  does  a  woman  (to 
take  an  instance,  thank  Heaven,  which  is  com 
mon)  grow,  with  favoring  circumstances,  under 
the  stimulus  of  the  richest  social  and  intellec 
tual  influences !  I  am  aware  that  there  has 
been  a  good  deal  said  in  poetry  about  the 
fringed  gentian  and  the  harebell  of  rocky  dis 
tricts  and  waysides,  and  I  know  that  it  is  pos 
sible  for  maidens  to  bloom  in  very  slight  soil 
into  a  wild-wood  grace  and  beauty ;  yet,  the 
world  through,  they  lack  that  wealth  of  charms, 
that  tropic  affluence  of  both  person  and  mind, 
which  higher  and  more  stimulating  culture 
brings, — the  passion  as  well  as  the  soul  glowing 
in  the  Cloth-of-Gold  rose.  Neither  persons  ncf 


1 84  MY  SUMMER   IN   A   GARDEN. 

plants  are  ever  fully  themselves  until  they  are 
cultivated  to  their  highest.  I,  for  one,  have  no 
fear  that  society  will  be  too  much  enriched. 
The  only  question  is  about  keeping  down  the 
weeds  ;  and  I  have  learned  by  experience,  that 
we  need  new  sorts  of  hoes,  and  more  disposi 
tion  to  use  them. 

Moral  Deduction.  —  The  difference  between 
soil  and  society  is  evident.  We  bury  decay  in 
the  earth  ;  we  plant  in  it  the  perishing  ;  we  feed 
it  with  offensive  refuse  :  but  nothing  grows  out 
of  it  that  is  not  clean  ;  it  gives  us  back  life  and 
beauty  for  our  rubbish.  Society  returns  us  what 
we  give  it. 

Pretending  to  reflect  upon  these  things,  but  in 
reality  watching  the  blue-jays,  who  are  pecking 
at  the  purple  berries  of  the  woodbine  on  the 
south  gable,  I  approach  the  house.  Polly  is 
picking  up  chestnuts  on  the  sward,  regardless 
of  the  high  wind  which  rattles  them  about  her 


WHAT   I   KNOW   ABOUT    GARDENING.  185 

head  and  upon  the  glass  roof  of  her  winter-gar 
den.  The  garden,  I  see,  is  filled  with  thrifty 
plants,  which  will  make  it  always  summer  there. 
The  callas  about  the  fountain  will  be  in  flower 
by  Christmas  :  the  plant  appears  to  keep  that 
holiday  in  her  secret  heart  all  summer.  I  close 
the  outer  windows  as  we  go  along,  and  congrat 
ulate  myself  that  we  are  ready  for  winter. 
For  the  winter-garden  I  have  no  responsibility: 
Polly  has  entire  charge  of  it.  I  am  only  re 
quired  to  keep  it  heated,  and  not  too  hot  either ; 
to  smoke  it  often  for  the  death  of  the  bugs  ;  to 
water  it  once  a  day  ;  to  move  this  and  that  into 
the  sun  and  out  of  the  sun  pretty  constantly : 
but  she  does  all  the  work.  We  never  relinquish 
that  theory. 

As  we  pass  around  the  house,  I  discover  a  boy 
in  the  ravine  filling  a  bag  with  chestnuts  and 
hickory-nuts.  They  are  not  plenty  this  year ; 
and  I  suggest  the  propriety  of  leaving  some 


1 86  MY   SUMMER   IN    A    GARDEN. 

for  us.  The  boy  is  a  little  slow  to  take  the 
idea  :  but  he  has  apparently  found  the  picking 
poor,  and  exhausted  it ;  for,  as  he  turns  away 
down  the  glen,  he  hails  me  with, — 

"  Mister,  I  say,  can  you  tell  me  where  I  can 
find  some  walnuts  ? " 

The  coolness  of  this  world  grows  upon  me. 
It  is  time  to  go  in  and  light  a  wood-fire  on  the 
hearth. 


CALVIN: 

A  STUDY  OF  CHARACTER. 


NOTE.  The  following  brief  Memoir  of  one  of  the  charac 
ters  in  this  book  is  added  by  his  friend,  m  the  hope  that  the 
record  of  an  exemplary  life  in  an  humble  sphere  may  be  of 
some  service  to  the  world. 

HARTFORD,  January,  1880. 


CALVIN: 

A   STUDY  OF   CHARACTER. 

ALVIN  is  dead.  His  life,  long  to  him, 
but  short  for  the  rest  of  us,  was  not 
marked  by  startling  adventures,  but 
iis  character  was  so  uncommon  and  his  qualities 
were  so  worthy  of  imitation,  that  I  have  been 
asked  by  those  who  personally  knew  him  to  set 
down  my  recollections  of  his  career. 

His  origin  and  ancestry  were  shrouded  in 
mystery ;  even  his  age  was  a  matter  of  pure 
conjecture.  Although  he  was  of  the  Maltese 
race,  I  have  reason  to  suppose  that  he  was 
American  by  birth  as  he  certainly  was  in  sym 
pathy.  Calvin  was  given  to  me  eight  years  ago 
by  Mrs.  Stowe,  but  she  knew  nothing  of  his  age 


ICp  CALVIN  : 

or  origin.  He  walked  into  her  house  one  day 
out  of  the  great  unknown  and  became  at  once 
at  home,  as  if  he  had  been  always  a  friend  of 
the  family.  He  appeared  to  have  artistic  and 
literary  tastes,  and  it  was  as  if  he  had  inquired 
at  the  door  if  that  was  the  residence  of  the 
author  of  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,"  and,  upon  be 
ing  assured  that  it  was,  had  decided  to  dwell 
there.  This  is,  of  course,  fanciful,  for  his  ante 
cedents  were  wholly  unknown,  but  in  his  time 
he  could  hardly  have  been  in  any  household 
where  he  would  not  have  heard  "  Uncle  Tom's 
Cabin"  talked  about.  When  he  came  to  Mrs. 
Stowe,  he  was  as  large  as  he  ever  was,  and 
apparently  as  old  as  he  ever  became.  Yet  there 
was  in  him  no  appearance  of  age;  he  was  in 
the  happy  maturity  of  all  his  powers,  and  you 
would  rather  have  said  that  in  that  maturity  he 
had  found  the  secret  of  perpetual  youth.  And 
it  was  as  difficult  to  believe  that  he  would  ever 


A  STUDY  OF   CHARACTER.  IQ1 

be  aged  as  it  was  to  imagine  that  he  had  ever 
been  in  immature  youth.  There  was  in  him  a 
mysterious  perpetuity. 

After  some  years,  when  Mrs.  Stowe  made  her 
winter  home  in  Florida,  Calvin  came  to  live  with 
us.  From  the  'first  moment,  he  fell  into  the 
ways  of  the  house  and  assumed  a  recognized 
position  in  the  family,  —  I  say  recognized,  be 
cause  after  he  became  known  he  was  always 
inquired  for  by  visitors,  and  in  the  letters  to  the 
other  members  of  the  family  he  always  received 
a  message.  Although  the  least  obtrusive  of  be 
ings,  his  individuality  always  made  itself  felt. 

His  personal  appearance  had  much  to  do  with 
this,  for  he  was  of  royal  mould,  and  had  an  air 
of  high  breeding.  He  was  large,  but  he  had 
nothing  of  the  fat  grossness  of  the  celebrated 
Angora  family;  though  powerful,  he  was  exqui 
sitely  proportioned,  and  as  graceful  in  every 
movement  as  a  young  leopard.  When  he  stood 


1 92  CALVIN  : 

up  to  open  a  door  —  he  opened  all  the  doors  with 
old-fashioned  latches  —  he  was  portentously  tall, 
and  when  stretched  on  the  rug  before  the  fire 
he  seemed  too  long  for  this  world  —  as  indeed 
he  was.  His  coat  was  the  finest  and  softest  I 
have  ever  seen,  a  shade  of  quiet  Maltese ;  and 
from  his  throat  downward,  underneath,  to  the 
white  tips  of  his  feet,  he  wore  the  whitest  and 
most  delicate  ermine ;  and  no  person  was  ever 
more  fastidiously  neat.  In  his  finely  formed 
head  you  saw  something  of  his  aristocratic  char 
acter  ;  the  ears  were  small  and  cleanly  cut,  there 
was  a  tinge  of  pink  in  the  nostrils,  his  face  was 
handsome,  and  the  expression  of  his  countenance 
exceedingly  intelligent  —  I  should  call  it  even  a 
sweet  expression  if  the  term  were  not  incon 
sistent  with  his  look  of  alertness  and  sagacity. 

It  is  difficult  to  convey  a  just  idea  of  his  gay- 
ety  in  connection  with  his  dignity  and  gravity, 
which  his  name  expressed.  As  we  know  noth- 


A    STUDY   OF    CHARACTER.  IQ3 

ing  of  his  family,  of  course  it  will  be  understood 
that  Calvin  was  his  Christian  name.  He  had 
times  of  relaxation  into  utter  playfulness,  delight 
ing  in  a  ball  of  yarn,  catching  sportively  at  stray 
ribbons  when  his  mistress  was  at  her  toilet,  and 
pursuing  his  own  tail,  with  hilarity,  for  lack  of 
anything  better.  He  could  amuse  himself  by 
the  hour,  and  he  did  not  care  for  children ;  per 
haps  something  in  his  past  was  present  to  his 
memory.  He  had  absolutely  no  bad  habits,  and 
his  disposition  was  perfect.  I  never  saw  him 
exactly  angry,  though  I  have  seen  his  tail  grow 
to  an  enormous  size  when  a  strange  cat  ap 
peared  upon  his  lawn.  He  disliked  cats,  evi 
dently  regarding  them  as  feline  and  treacherous, 
and  he  had  no  association  with  them.  Occa 
sionally  there  would  be  heard  a  night  concert 
in  the  shrubbery  Calvin  would  ask  to  have 
the  door  opened,  and  then  you  would  hear  a 
rush  and  a  "  pestzt,"  ^and  the  concert  would  ex- 
9  M 


194  CALVIN  : 

plode,  and  Calvin  would  quietly  come  in  and 
resume  his  seat  on  the  hearth.  There  was  no 
trace  of  anger  in  his  manner,  but  he  would  n't 
have  any  of  that  about  the  house.  He  had  the 
rare  virtue  of  magnanimity.  Although  he  had 
fixed  notions  about  his  own  rights,  and  extraor 
dinary  persistency  in  getting  them,  he  never 
showed  temper  at  a  repulse ;  he  simply  and 
firmly  persisted  till  he  had  what  he  wanted. 
His  diet  was  one  point ;  his  idea  was  that  of 
the  scholars  about  dictionaries,  —  to  "get  the 
best."  He  knew  as  well  as  any  one  what  was 
in  the  house,  and  would  refuse  beef  if  turkey 
was  to  be  had  ;  and  if  there  were  oysters,  he 
would  wait  over  the  turkey  to  see  if  the  oysters 
would  not  be  forthcoming.  And  yet  he  was  not 
a  gross  gourmand ;  he  would  eat  bread  if  he  saw 
me  eating  it,  and  thought  he  was  not  being  im 
posed  on.  His  habits  of  feeding,  also,  were 
refined ;  he  never  used  a  knife,  and  he  would 


A   STUDY   OF    CHARACTER.  IQ5 

put  up  his  hand  and  draw  the  fork  down  to  his 
mouth  as  gracefully  as  a  grown  person.  Unless 
necessity  compelled,  he  would  not  eat  in  the 
kitchen,  but  insisted  upon  his  meals  in  the 
dining-room,  and  would  wait  patiently,  unless  a 
stranger  were  present ;  and  then  he  was  sure  to 
importune  the  visitor,  hoping  that  the  latter  was 
ignorant  of  the  rule  of  the  house,  and  would  give 
him  something.  They  used  to  say  that  he  pre 
ferred  as  his  table-cloth  on  the  floor  a  certain 
well-known  church  journal ;  but  this  was  said  by 
an  Episcopalian.  So  far  as  I  know,  he  had  no 
religious  prejudices,  except  that  he  did  not  like 
the  association  with  Romanists.  He  tolerated 
the  servants,  because  they  belonged  to  the  house, 
and  would  sometimes  linger  by  the  kitchen  stove ; 
but  the  moment  visitors  came  in  he  arose,  opened 
the  door,  and  marched  into  the  drawing-room. 
Yet  he  enjoyed  the  company  of  his  equals,  and 
never  withdrew,  no  matter  how  many  callers  — 


196  CALVIN  : 

whom  he  recognized  as  of  his  society  —  might 
come  into  the  drawing-room.  Calvin  was  fond 
of  company,  but  he  wanted  to  choose  it ;  and  I 
have  no  doubt  that  his  was  an  aristocratic  fas 
tidiousness  rather  than  one  of  faith.  It  is  so 
with  most  people. 

The  intelligence  of  Calvin  was  something  phe 
nomenal,  in  his  rank  of  life.  He  established  a 
method  of  communicating  his  wants,  and  even 
some  of  his  sentiments  ;  and  he  could  help  him 
self  in  many  things.  There  was  a  furnace  reg 
ister  in  a  retired  room,  where  he  used  to  go 
when  he  wished  to  be  alone,  that  he  always 
opened  when  he  desired  more  heat ;  but  never 
shut  it,  any  more  than  he  shut  the  door  after 
himself.  He  could  do  almost  everything  but 
speak ;  and  you  would  declare  sometimes  that 
you  could  see  a  pathetic  longing  to  do  that  in 
his  intelligent  face.  I  have  no  desire  to  over 
draw  his  qualities,  but  if  there  was  one  thing  in 


A   STUDY   OF    CHARACTER.  1 97 

him  more  noticeable  than  another,  it  was  his  fond 
ness  for  nature.  He  could  content  himself  for 
hours  at  a  low  window,  looking  into  the  ravine 
and  at  the  great  trees,  noting  the  smallest  stir 
there;  he  delighted,  above  all  things,  to  accom 
pany  me  walking  about  the  garden,  hearing  the 
birds,  getting  the  smell  of  the  fresh  earth,  and 
rejoicing  in  the  sunshine.  He  followed  me  and 
gambolled  like  a  dog,  rolling  over  on  the  turf 
and  exhibiting  his  delight  in  a  hundred  ways. 
If  I  worked,  he  sat  and  watched  me,  or  looked 
off  over  the  bank,  and  kept  his  ear  open  to  the 
twitter  in  the  cherry-trees.  When  it  stormed,  he 
was  sure  to  sit  at  the  window,  keenly  watching 
the  rain  or  the  snow,  glancing  up  and  down  at 
its  falling;  and  a  winter  tempest  always  de 
lighted  him.  I  think  he  was  genuinely  fond  of 
birds,  but,  so  far  as  I  know,  he  usually  confined 
himself  to  one  a  day;  he  never  killed,  as  some 
sportsmen  do,  for  the  sake  of  killing,  but  only  as 


198  CALVIN  : 

civilized  people  do,  —  from  necessity.  He  was 
intimate  with  the  flying-squirrels  who  dwell  in 
the  chestnut-trees,  —  too  intimate,  for  almost 
every  day  in  the  summer  he  would  bring  in  one, 
until  he  nearly  discouraged  them.  He  was,  in 
deed,  a  superb  hunter,  and  would  have  been  a 
devastating  one,  if  his  bump  of  destructiveness 
had  not  been  offset  by  a  bump  of  moderation* 
There  was  very  little  of  the  brutality  of  the 
lower  animals  about  him ;  I  don't  think  he  en 
joyed  rats  for  themselves,  but  he  knew  his  busi 
ness,  and  for  the  first  few  months  of  his  residence 
with  us  he  waged  an  awful  campaign  against  the 
horde,  and  after  that  his  simple  presence  was 
sufficient  to  deter  them  from  coming  on  the 
premises.  Mice  amused  him,  but  he  usually  con 
sidered  them  too  small  game  to  be  taken  seri 
ously  ;  I  have  seen  him  play  for  an  hour  with  a 
mouse,  and  then  let  him  go  with  a  royal  con 
descension.  In  this  whole  matter  of  "  getting  a 


A   STUDY   OF   CHARACTER.  1 99 

living,"  Calvin  was  a  great  contrast  to  the  ra 
pacity  of  the  age  in  which  he  lived. 

I  hesitate  a  little  to  speak  of  his  capacity  for 
friendship  and  the  affectionateness  of  his  nature, 
for  I  know  from  his  own  reserve  that  he  would 
not  care  to  have  it  much  talked  about.  We  un 
derstood  each  other  perfectly,  but  we  never  made 
any  fuss  about  it ;  when  I  spoke  his  name  and 
snapped  my  fingers,  he  came  to  me ;  when  I  re 
turned  home  at  night,  he  was  pretty  sure  to  be 
Waiting  for  me  near  the  gate,  and  would  rise  and 
saunter  along  the  walk,  as  if  his  being  there  were 
purely  accidental,  —  so  shy  was  he  commonly  of 
showing  feeling ;  and  when  I  opened  the  door 
he  never  rushed  in,  like  a  cat,  but  loitered,  and 
lounged,  as  if  he  had  had  no  intention  of  going 
in,  but  would  condescend  to.  And  yet,  the  fact 
was,  he  knew  dinner  was  ready,  and  he  was  bound 
to  be  there.  He  kept  the  run  of  dinner-time.  It 
happened  sometimes,  during  our  absence  in  the 


2OO  CALVIN  : 

summer,  that  dinner  would  be  early,  and  Calvin, 
walking  about  the  grounds,  missed  it  and  came 
in  late.  But  he  never  made  a  mistake  the  sec 
ond  day.  There  was  one  thing  he  never  did,  — 
he  never  rushed  through  an  open  doorway.  He 
never  forgot  his  dignity.  If  he  had  asked  to 
have  the  door  opened,  and  was  eager  to  go  out, 
he  always  went  deliberately ;  I  can  see  him  now, 
standing  on  the  sill,  looking  about  at  the  sky  as 
if  he  was  thinking  whether  it  were  worth  while 
to  take  an  umbrella,  until  he  was  near  having  his 
tail  shut  in. 

His  friendship  was  rather  constant  than  de 
monstrative.  When  we  returned  from  an  absence 
of  nearly  two  years,  Calvin  welcomed  us  with 
evident  pleasure,  but  showed  his  satisfaction 
rather  by  tranquil  happiness  than  by  fuming 
about.  He  had  the  faculty  of  making  us  glad 
to  get  home.  It  was  his  constancy  that  was 
so  attractive.  He  liked  companionship,  but  he 


A   STUDY  OF   CHARACTER.  2OI 

would  n't  be  petted,  or  fussed  over,  or  sit  in  any 
one's  lap  a  moment;  he  always  extricated  him 
self  from  such  familiarity  with  dignity  and  with 
no  show  of  temper.  If  there  was  any  petting  to 
be  done,  however,  he  chose  to  do  it.  Often  he 
would  sit  looking  at  me,  and  then,  moved  by  a 
delicate  affection,  come  and  pull  at  my  coat  and 
sleeve  until  he  could  touch  my  face  with  his  nose, 
and  then  go  away  contented.  He  had  a  habit 
of  coming  to  my  study  in  the  morning,  sitting 
quietly  by  my  side  or  on  the  table  for  hours, 
watching  the  pen  run  over  the  paper,  occasion 
ally  swinging  his  tail  round  for  a  blotter,  and 
then  going  to  sleep  among  the  papers  by  the 
inkstand.  Or,  more  rarely,  he  would  watch  the 
writing  from  a  perch  on  my  shoulder.  Writing 
always  interested  him,  and,  until  he  understood 
it,  he  wanted  to  hold  the  pen. 

He  always  held  himself  in  a  kind  of  reserve 
with  his  friend,  as  if  he  had  said,  "  Let  us  respect 
9* 


2O2  CALVIN  : 

our  personality,  and  not  make  a  '  mess '  of  friend 
ship."  He  saw,  with  Emerson,  the  risk  of  de 
grading  it  to  trivial  conveniency.  "Why  insist 
on  rash  personal  relations  with  your  friend  ? " 
"  Leave  this  touching  and  clawing."  Yet  I  would 
not  give  an  unfair  notion  of  his  aloofness,  his 
fine  sense  of  the  sacredness  of  the  me  and  the 
not-me.  And,  at  the  risk  of  not  being  believed, 
I  will  relate  an  incident,  which  was  often  re 
peated.  Calvin  had  the  practice  of  passing  a 
portion  of  the  night  in  the  contemplation  of  its 
beauties,  and  would  come  into  our  chamber  over 
the  roof  of  the  conservatory  through  the  open 
window,  summer  and  winter,  and  go  to  sleep  on 
the  foot  of  my  bed.  He  would  do  this  always 
exactly  in  this  way;  he  never  was  content  to 
stay  in  the  chamber  if  we  compelled  him  to  go 
upstairs  and  through  the  door.  He  had  the  ob 
stinacy  of  General  Grant.  But  this  is  by  the 
way.  In  the  morning,  he  performed  his  toilet 


A   STUDY  OF   CHARACTER.  2O3 

and  went  down  to  breakfast  with  the  rest  of  the 
family.  Now,  when  the  mistress  was  absent 
from  home,  and  at  no  other  time,  Calvin  would 
come  in  the  morning,  when  the  bell  rang,  to  the 
head  of  the  bed,  put  up  his  feet  and  look  into 
my  face,  follow  me  about  when  I  rose,  "assist" 
at  the  dressing,  and  in  many  purring  ways  show 
his  fondness,  as  if  he  had  plainly  said,  "  I  know 
that  she  has  gone  away,  but  I  am  here."  Such 
was  Calvin  in  rare  moments. 

He  had  his  limitations.  Whatever  passion  he 
had  for  nature,  he  had  no  conception  of  art. 
There  was  sent  to  him  once  a  fine  and  very 
expressive  cat's  head  in  bronze,  by  Fremiet.  I 
placed  it  on  the  floor.  He  regarded  it  intently, 
approached  it  cautiously  and  crouchingly,  touched 
it  with  his  nose,  perceived  the  fraud,  turned  away 
abruptly,  and  never  would  notice  it  afterward. 
On  the  whole,  his  life  was  not  only  a  successful 
one,  but  a  happy  one.  He  never  had  but  one 


2O4  CALVIN  : 

fear,  so  far  as  I  know :  he  had  a  mortal  and  a 
reasonable  terror  of  plumbers.  He  would  never 
stay  in  the  house  when  they  were  here.  No 
coaxing  could  quiet  him.  Of  course  he  did  n't 
share  our  fear  about  their  charges,  but  he  must 
have  had  some  dreadful  experience  with  them 
in  that  portion  of  his  life  which  is  unknown  to 
us.  A  plumber  was  to  him  the  devil,  and  I  have 
no  doubt  that,  in  his  scheme,  plumbers  were  fore 
ordained  to  do  him  mischief. 

In  speaking  of  his  worth,  it  has  never  occurred 
to  me  to  estimate  Calvin  by  the  worldly  stand 
ard.  I  know  that  it  is  customary  now,  when 
any  one  dies,  to  ask  how  much  he  was  worth, 
and  that  no  obituary  in  the  newspapers  is  con 
sidered  complete  without  such  an  estimate.  The 
plumbers  in  our  house  were  one  day  overheard 
to  say  that,  "They  say  that  she  says  that  he  says 
that  he  would  n't  take  a  hundred  dollars  for  him." 
It  is  unnecessary  to  say  that  I  never  made  such 


A   STUDY   OF  CHARACTER.  2O$ 

a  remark,  and  that,  so  far  as  Calvin  was  con 
cerned,  there  was  no  purchase  in  money. 

As  I  look  back  upon  it,  Calvin's  life  seems  to 
me  a  fortunate  one,  for  it  was  natural  and  un 
forced.  He  ate  when  he  was  hungry,  slept  when 
he  was  sleepy,  and  enjoyed  existence  to  the  very 
tips  of  his  toes  and  the  end  of  his  expressive  and 
slow-moving  tail.  He  delighted  to  roam  about 
the  garden,  and  stroll  among  the  trees,  and  to 
lie  on  the  green  grass  and  luxuriate  in  all  the 
sweet  influences  of  summer.  You  could  never 
accuse  him  of  idleness,  and  yet  he  knew  the 
secret  of  repose.  The  poet  who  wrote  so  pret 
tily  of  him  that  his  little  life  was  rounded  with 
a  sleep,  understated  his  felicity ;  it  was  rounded 
with  a  good  many.  His  conscience  never  seemed 
to  interfere  with  his  slumbers.  In  fact,  he  had 
good  habits  and  a  contented  mind.  I  can  see 
him  now  walk  in  at  the  study  door,  sit  down  by 
my  chair,  bring  his  tail  artistically  about  his  feet, 


2O6  CALVIN  : 

and  look  up  at  me  with  unspeakable  happiness 
in  his  handsome  face.  I  often  thought  that  he 
felt  the  dumb  limitation  which  denied  him  the 
power  of  language.  But  since  he  was  denied 
speech,  he  scorned  the  inarticulate  mouthings 
of  the  lower  animals.  The  vulgar  mewing  and 
yowling  of  the  cat  species  was  beneath  him ;  he 
sometimes  uttered  a  sort  of  articulate  and  well- 
bred  ejaculation,  when  he  wished  to  call  atten 
tion  to  something  that  he  considered  remarkable, 
or  to  some  want  of  his,  but  he  never  went  whin 
ing  about.  He  would  sit  for  hours  at  a  closed 
window,  when  he  desired  to  enter,  without  a 
murmur,  and  when  it  was  opened  he  never  ad 
mitted  that  he  had  been  impatient  by  "  bolting " 
in.  Though  speech  he  had  not,  and  the  unpleas 
ant  kind  of  utterance  given  to  his  race  he  would 
not  use,  he  had  a  mighty  power  of  purr  to  ex- 
press  his  measureless  content  with  congenia\ 
society.  There  was  in  him  a  musical  organ  with 


A   STUDY   OF   CHARACTER.  2C»7 

stops  of  varied  power  and  expression,  upon  which 
I  have  no  doubt  he  could  have  performed  Scar 
latti's  celebrated  cat's-fugue. 

Whether  Calvin  died  of  old  age,  or  was  car 
ried  off  by  one  of  the  diseases  incident  to  youth, 
it  is  impossible  to  say;  for  his  departure  was  as 
quiet  as  his  advent  was  mysterious.  I  only  know 
that  he  appeared  to  us  in  this  world  in  his  per 
fect  stature  and  beauty,  and  that  after  a  time, 
like  Lohengrin,  he  withdrew.  In  his  illness 
there  was  nothing  more  to  be  regretted  than 
in  all  his  blameless  life.  I  suppose  there  never 
was  an  illness  that  had  more  of  dignity  and 
sweetness  and  resignation  in  it.  It  came  on 
gradually,  in  a  kind  of  listlessness  and  want  of 
appetite.  An  alarming  symptom  was  his  pref 
erence  for  the  warmth  of  a  furnace-register  to 
the  lively  sparkle  of  the  open  wood-fire.  What 
ever  pain  he  suffered,  he  bore  it  in  silence,  and 
seemed  only  anxious  not  to  obtrude  his  malady. 


2O8  CALVIN  : 

We  tempted  him  with  the  delicacies  of  the  sea 
son,  but  it  soon  became  impossible  for  him  to 
eat,  and  for  two  weeks  he  ate  or  drank  scarcely 
anything.  Sometimes  he  made  an  effort  to  take 
something,  but  it  was  evident  that  he  made  the 
effort  to  please  us.  The  neighbors  —  and  I 
am  convinced  that  the  advice  of  neighbors  is 
never  good  for  anything — suggested  catnip.  He 
would  n't  even  smell  it.  We  had  the  attendance 
of  an  amateur  practitioner  of  medicine,  whose 
real  office  was  the  cure  of  souls,  but  nothing 
touched  his  case.  He  took  what  was  offered, 
but  it  was  with  the  air  of  one  to  whom  the  time 
for  pellets  was  passed.  He  sat  or  lay  day  after 
day  almost  motionless,  never  once  making  a  dis 
play  of  those  vulgar  convulsions  or  contortions 
of  pain  which  are  so  disagreeable  to  society. 
His  favorite  place  was  on  the  brightest  spot  of 
a  Smyrna  rug  by  the  conservatory,  where  the 
sunlight  fell  and  he  could  hear  the  fountain  play. 


A   STUDY    OF    CHARACTER.  2OQ 

If  we  went  to  him  and  exhibited  our  interest  in 
his  condition,  he  always  purred  in  recognition  of 
our  sympathy.  And  when  I  spoke  his  name,  he 
looked  up  with  an  expression  that  said,  "I  un 
derstand  it,  old  fellow,  but  it 's  no  use."  He  was 
to  all  who  came  to  visit  him  a  model  of  calmness 
and  patience  in  affliction. 

I  was  absent  from  home  at  the  last,  but  heard 
by  daily  postal-card  of  his  failing  condition  ;  and 
never  again  saw  him  alive.  One  sunny  morning, 
he  rose  from  his  rug,  went  into  the  conservatory 
(he  was  very  thin  then),  walked  around  it  delib 
erately,  looking  at  all  the  plants  he  knew,  and 
then  went  to  the  bay-window  in  the  dining-room, 
and  stood  a  long  time  looking  out  upon  the  little 
field,  now  brown  and  sere,  and  toward  the  gar 
den,  where  perhaps  the  happiest  hours  of  his  life 
had  been  spent  It  was  a  last  look.  He  turned 
and  walked  away,  laid  himself  down  upon  the 
bright  spot  in  the  rug,  and  quietly  died. 


210  CALVIN: 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  a  little  shock 
went  through  the  neighborhood  when  it  was 
known  that  Calvin  was  dead,  so  marked  was  his 
individuality ;  and  his  friends,  one  after  another, 
came  in  to  see  him.  There  was  no  sentimental 
nonsense  about  his  obsequies  ;  it  was  felt  that 
any  parade  would  have  been  distasteful  to  him. 
John,  who  acted  as  undertaker,  prepared  a  candle- 
box  for  him,  and  I  believe  assumed  a  profes 
sional  decorum  ;  but  there  may  have  been  the 
usual  levity  underneath,  for  I  heard  that  he  re 
marked  in  the  kitchen  that  it  was  the  "dryest 
wake  he  ever  attended."  Everybody,  however, 
felt  a  fondness  for  Calvin,  and  regarded  him  with 
a  certain  respect.  Between  him  and  Bertha  there 
existed  a  great  friendship,  and  she  apprehended 
his  nature  ;  she  used  to  say  that  sometimes  she 
was  afraid  of  him,  he  looked  at  her  so  intelli 
gently  ;  she  was  never  certain  that  he  was  what 
he  appeared  to  be. 


A   STUDY   OF   CHARACTER.  211 

When  I  returned,  they  had  laid  Calvin  on  a 
table  in  an  upper  chamber  by  an  open  window. 
It  was  February.  He  reposed  in  a  candle-box, 
lined  about  the  edge  with  evergreen,  and  at  his 
head  stood  a  little  wine-glass  with  flowers.  He 
lay  with  his  head  tucked  down  in  his  arms,  —  a 
favorite  position  of  his  before  the  fire, — as  if 
asleep  in  the  comfort  of  his  soft  and  exquisite 
fur.  It  was  the  involuntary  exclamation  of  those 
who  saw  him,  "  How  natural  he  looks  ! "  As  for 
myself,  I  said  nothing.  John  buried  him  under 
the  twin  hawthorn-trees,  —  one  white  and  the 
other  pink,  —  in  a  spot  where  Calvin  was  fond 
of  lying  and  listening  to  the  hum  of  summer 
insects  and  the  twitter  of  birds. 

Perhaps  I  have  failed  to  make  appear  the  in 
dividuality  of  character  that  was  so  evident  to 
those  who  knew  him.  At  any  rate,  I  have  set 
down  nothing  concerning  him  but  the  literal 


212  CALVIN. 

truth.  He  was  always  a  mystery.  I  did  not 
know  whence  he  came;  I  do  not  know  whither 
he  has  gone.  I  would  not  weave  one  spray  of 
falsehood  in  the  wreath  I  lay  upon  his  grave. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AM  4 


" 


IS  192 


FEB  71955 


3  1955 


3EC1619551U 


20m-ll,'20 


UN      -.RSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


